How to get an IPublishedContent item from a Udi in Umbraco 10 and above

Today, my colleague asked me how he can get an IPublishedContent item from a Udi in Umbraco.

This comes up a lot and it would be great to have an answer that I can go to every time rather than searching my different projects each time for how I did it.

So this post is for my colleague and future me. Also for anyone else who finds it.

First we need to get the Udi as a string:

var uriString = content.Value<string>("author");

Get the Udi as a string.

Now we have the string value, we need to use it to create a Udi object.

//make sure we have our using statement at the top
using Umbraco.Cms.Core

//create the Udi
var udi = Udi.Create(new Uri(uriString));

Create a Udi object

Now we have it as a Udi object, we can then use that to get the IPublishedContent item from Umbraco, but it could be a media item or a content item, or even a member, who knows?

//add our using statement for the UdiEntityType usage
using static Umbraco.Cms.Core.Constants;

IPublishedContent contentItem = null;

//In this case, Umbraco is the UmbracoHelper and it is in a View.

switch(udi.EntityType)
{
    case UdiEntityType.Document:
        contentItem = Umbraco.Content(udi);
        break;
    case UdiEntityType.Media:
        contentItem = Umbraco.Media(udi);
        break;
    //you could handle other entity types below
}

Get the IPublishedContent from the cache

Here is all the code together:

string uriString = Model.Value<string>("author");
Udi udi = Udi.Create(new Uri(uriString));

IPublishedContent contentItem = null;

switch(udi.EntityType)
{
    case UdiEntityType.Document:
        contentItem = Umbraco.Content(udi);
        break;
    case UdiEntityType.Media:
        contentItem = Umbraco.Media(udi);
        break;
    //you could handle other entity types below
}

All the code together