Hi Ben,

In the webApi you can use Umbraco Services. Of course you don't need to parse XML. Please, can you describe more clear how your structure has been organized ?

Read about services: https://our.umbraco.org/documentation/reference/management/services/contentservice

Thanks

Thanks for your reply Alex. I have read through the link that you sent but am unsure which method to use - my issue seems to be parsing content which is added using the "Multi-Node Tree Picker". I have now supplied the full method within my UmbracoApiController (with comments regarding the structure/document type/data type).

The bit which is clearly wrong is getting the reference to the featuredArticles on the page

string myFeaturedArticles = page.featuredArticles.RawXmlElement.ToString();

I would rather do something like this.... but I'm unsure of the code to write for data type property editor "Multi-Node Tree Picker"

var articles = page.AncestorOrSelf().Descendants("NewsArticle").Where("articlePhotoImage != \"\"").OrderBy("UpdateDate desc");

Anyway, here is the code

 public IEnumerable<NewsItem> GetNews(int pageNumber, int pageSize, string iaith)
{
    int currentPageId;
    if (iaith == "en-GB")
    {
        currentPageId = 1051;
    }
    else
    {
        currentPageId = 1052;
    }

    // Get a reference to the page
    var page = Umbraco.Content(currentPageId);

    // The document type of the page is "Homepage".  
    // The "Homepage" document type contains a property named "featuredArticles".
    // When looking at the field information of "featuredArticles", the type shows as "News Article Picker"
    // The Data Type "News Article Picker" uses Property Editor "Multi-Node Tree Picker", adn the Property editor GUID is 7e062c13-7c41-4ad9-b389-41d88aeef87c
    // The Data Type "News Article Picker" has the following properties:
    //      Select tree type : Content
    //      XPath type : Global
    //      XPath expression : $ancestorOrSelf//NewsArchiveLandingPage
    //      XPath filter type : enable
    //      XPath filter : /*[self::NewsArticle]
    //      Maximum node selections : 3
    //      Minimum node selections : 3
    //      Data as CSV or XML : XML


    // get a reference to RawXmlElement
    string myFeaturedArticles = page.featuredArticles.RawXmlElement.ToString();

    // clean it up a bit
    myFeaturedArticles = myFeaturedArticles.Replace("<MultiNodePicker type=\"content\">", "");
    myFeaturedArticles = myFeaturedArticles.Replace("</MultiNodePicker>", "");
    myFeaturedArticles = myFeaturedArticles.Replace("\r\n", "");
    myFeaturedArticles = myFeaturedArticles.Replace(" ", "");

    // create a string list featuredArts to hold a list of the articles which we will later remove from the articles list
    List<string> featuredArts = new List<string>();

    // loop through the list, building up featuredArts
    while (myFeaturedArticles.Length > 0)
    {
        string x = myFeaturedArticles.Substring(8, 4);// closingindex - 8);
        featuredArts.Add(x);
        myFeaturedArticles = myFeaturedArticles.Substring(21, myFeaturedArticles.Length - 21);

    }

    // get a reference to all of the Descendants of the page of type "NewsArticle" matching the where clause
    var articles = page.AncestorOrSelf().Descendants("NewsArticle").Where("articlePhotoImage != \"\"").OrderBy("UpdateDate desc");

    // count them....
    int count = 0;
    foreach (var item in articles)
    {
        count++;
    }

    // loop backwards, removing any articles which exist in the featuredArts list.
    for (int i = count - 1; i >= 0; i--)
    {
        var article = articles[i];
        if (featuredArts.Contains(article.Id.ToString()))
        {
            articles.Remove(article);
        }
    }

    List<NewsItem> ls = new List<NewsItem>();

    // now loop through the remaining articles, builing up a list of NewsItem.
    // get the appropriate number of items based on pageNumber and pageSize
    foreach (var item in articles.Skip((pageNumber - 1) * pageSize).Take(pageSize))
    {
        NewsItem news = new NewsItem();

        string trimmedContent = "ERROR LOADING CONTENT";
        try
        {
            trimmedContent = Regex.Match(Regex.Replace(Regex.Replace(item.articleContent.ToString(), @"<[^>]*>", ""), @"\r\n?|\n", String.Empty), @"^.{1,120}\b(?<!\s)").Value + " ...";
        }
        catch
        {
            trimmedContent = "ERROR LOADING CONTENT";
        }

        news.Id = item.Id.ToString();
        news.Url = item.Url;
        news.Title = item.articleHeadline.ToString();
        news.Excerpt = trimmedContent;// item.articleContent.ToString();
        news.Image = item.articlePhotoImage.ToString();
        news.UpdateDate = item.UpdateDate.ToString();
        news.UpdateDateUTC = item.UpdateDate;

        ls.Add(news);

    }

    return ls;

}

is working on a reply...