Ektron 801 SP1
I am using the following code to fetch some smart form content. Can I pre-sort (using OrderByField?) before I fetch 20 rows? I am sorting memberlist but that is after the fact and kinda useless. What am I missing?
Criteria<ContentProperty> criteria1 = new Criteria<ContentProperty>();
criteria1.AddFilter(ContentProperty.XmlConfigurationId, CriteriaFilterOperator.EqualTo, MEMBERS_ID);
criteria1.PagingInfo = new PagingInfo(20);
List<ContentType<member>> memberslist = contentTypeManager.GetList(criteria1);
I have good news and bad news for you.
First, the good news. You can sort by Content Properties with the Criteria object before you pull the 20 items. You'll want to use the OrderByField and OrderByDirection properties of the criteria.
criteria.OrderByField = ContentProperty.DateCreated;
criteria.OrderByDirection = EkEnumeration.OrderByDirection.Descending;
The bad news comes when trying to order items based on fields within the Smart Form. You might be able to do so using the IndexSearch API, but since Ektron 8.0* still relies on Microsoft's Indexing Service, I'm not a fan of that approach and don't have any code to share. If you choose to go that route, the premise is to use search to return the content IDs in the correct order, then use the criteria, as you are, to get items with those IDs.
What you can do with just the API is use Microsoft LINQ to sort the data after it's loaded, but in order to get the right results in the right order you have to load all items first (and ideally cache them to minimize performance impact). I'm using one of my content types as an example, but you should get the idea.
var membersList = new List<SlideBannerType>();
var sortedList = membersList.OrderBy(s => s.EnableAlternateText);
var firstpage = sortedList.Take(20);
var nextpage = sortedList.Skip(20).Take(20);
It's not ideal, but it does work very well for smaller (in the hundreds, perhaps thousands, but not tens of) data sets.
The second bit of good news, though, is that Ektron uses Microsoft Search Server for versions 8.5 and up. This has a much, much more robust API and performs fantastic (both in terms of speed and reliability). The premise would actually stay the same as that for the IndexSearch, use Search to get the IDs in the right order, and then ContentManager (or ContentTypeManager) to get the items. I've used this approach several times, albeit not with Smart Forms specifically. Your best result would come from upgrading to 8.6 and Microsoft Search Server and using the two APIs together to get each page of data. In doing so, it would actually be almost trivial at that point to mix in advanced search and filter options as well with the new search APIs.