Hi Alex,

getting the string value for a prevalue is quite straightforward as the IDs are unique across all prevalues of all datatypes. The other way around though is not that easy because even with one datatype you can add the same value twice, so you have no chance of converting the actual content back to an ID as it would be ambiguous.

What you could do though is taking care of the duplication thing yourself and writing a custom XsltExtension which will get the prevalues for a specific datatype complete with values and id and then try to match your content to an id. I have once written a web service which did something similar for a specific data type, maybe this will help you further:

            //retrieve all datatypes available
            DataTypeDefinition[] types = DataTypeDefinition.GetAll();

            //loop through the datatypes and extract the pre-values if the smartbite datatype was found
            foreach (DataTypeDefinition type in types) {
                if (type.Text == "my custom type") {
                    SortedList list = PreValues.GetPreValues(type.Id);

                    foreach (DictionaryEntry o in list) {

                        PreValue v = ((PreValue)o.Value);
                        int id = v.Id;
                        string name = v.Value;
                        //do something with it

                    }
                }
            }

Sascha

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