Umbraco 13: Get Dropdown Value From A Custom Member Type

I've been working with custom functionality for registering and authenticating external site users in Umbraco 13 using its Members feature.

A custom Member Type was created so I could create field properties to specifically store all member registeration data. This consisted of Textboxes, Textareas and Dropdown fields.

Getting values for fields in code is very straight-forward, but I encountered issues in when dealing with fields that consist of preset values, such as a Dropdown list of titles (Mr/Mrs/Ms/etc).

Based on the Umbraco documentation for working with a Dropdown field, I should be able to get the selected value through this one line of code:

@if (Model.HasValue("title"))
{
    <p>@(Model.Value<string>("title"))</p>
}

When working with custom properties from a Member Type, the approach seems to be different. A GetValue() is the only accessor we have available to us to output a value - something we are already accustomed to working in Umbraco.

IMember? member = memberService.GetByEmail("johndoe@gmail.com");
string title = member.Properties["title"].GetValue()?.ToString(); // Output: "[\"Mr\"]"

However, the value is returned as a serialized array. This is also the case when using the typed GetValue() accessor on the property:

IMember? member = memberService.GetByEmail("johndoe@gmail.com");
string title = member.GetValue<string>("title"); // Output: "[\"Mr\"]"

The only way to get around this was to create a custom extension method to deserialize the string array so the value alone could be output:

public static class MemberPropertyExtensions
{
    /// <summary>
    /// Gets the selected value of a Dropdown property.
    /// </summary>
    /// <param name="property"></param>
    /// <returns></returns>
    public static string? GetSelectedDropdownValue(this IProperty property)
    {
        if (property == null)
            return string.Empty;

        string? value = property?.GetValue()?.ToString();

        if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(value))
            return string.Empty;

        string[]? propertyArray = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<string[]>(value);

        return propertyArray?.FirstOrDefault();
    }
}

It's a simple but effective solution. Now our original code can be updated by adding our newly created GetSelectedDropdownValue() method to the property:

IMember? member = memberService.GetByEmail("johndoe@gmail.com");
string title = member.Properties["title"].GetSelectedDropdownValue();

Useful Information

• Umbraco: Setting A DropDownList Value Programmatically