Loading document data

The system provides various types of predefined components (web parts or controls) that allow you to load and display data from the documents in your website’s content tree.

The most common examples include:

Documents data source, combined with a Basic repeater, Basic datalist or Basic universal viewer
Listing web parts with built-in document data sources (Repeater, Datalist, Grid, …)
Components for displaying documents in a hierarchical structure (Universal document viewer, Hierarchical viewer — see Using hierarchical transformations)

When configuring document data sources, fill in the Path property to specify which documents to load. See Writing document path expressions for details.

You can also use the Content filter properties to further limit which documents that data source retrieves:

Web part property	Description	Sample value
Document types	Determines which document types to load. Enter a list of document type code names, separated by semicolons (;). You can use the * wildcard as a substitute for any sequence of characters. For example Product.* includes the document types Product.Camera, Product.CellPhone, Product.Computer etc. If you leave the property empty, the data source retrieves all document types. Note: If you use an empty value to load all document types, only the general data columns from View_CMS_Tree_Joined are available in the retrieved data. The specific fields of individual document types are not included. Keep this fact in mind when writing transformations, WHERE conditions, ORDER BY expressions, or otherwise using columns.	cms.menuitem;cms.article;cms.news
Category name	Allows you to load only documents that belong to the selected categories.
Combine with default culture	Indicates if the data source loads the default language version for documents that are not available in the language selected by the current user. You can choose between Yes and No, or use the website-level settings (Settings -> Content -> Combine with default culture).
Culture code	Determines which culture version of the specified documents the data source loads. Leave the property empty to automatically use the language selected by the current user.	en-us
Maximum nesting level	Specifies the maximum number of content tree sub-levels from which the data source loads content. The number is relative, i.e. counted from the beginning of the specified document path. The value -1 loads documents from all sub-levels.
ORDER BY expression	Sets the value of the ORDER BY clause in the SELECT statement used to retrieve the content.	ProductName ASC, ProductPrice DESC
Select only published	Indicated whether the data source only loads published documents (based on workflow and content scheduling).
Select top N documents	Specifies the maximum amount of documents to load. If empty, the data source loads all possible documents.
Site name	Specifies the site from which the documents are loaded. If you leave the value empty, the data source retrieves content from the current website.	CorporateSite
WHERE condition	Sets the value of the WHERE clause in the SELECT statement used to retrieve the content.	ProductPrice > 100 AND ProductColor=‘green’
Filter out duplicate documents	If checked, the data source filters out duplicate links to the same document (see creating linked documents for details).
Check permissions (System settings category)	Indicates whether the data source checks the permissions of the users viewing the content. If enabled, only documents for which the user has the Read permission are loaded (for secured documents).

Important

We recommend that you carefully consider the performance aspects of components that load data. Fill in the Columns property and set up caching.

For more information, see:

Tip: You can also allow users to dynamically choose which data is displayed on the live site. See Filtering and paging data.