Hi Erin,

How are you creating/assigning the custom properties? Are they additional columns for the document type or what exactly are they?

Typically you can use custom macros to retrieve any value, or built in macros if the correct one is available.

Please let us know what the purpose of this functionality is so that we can provide accurate suggestions. Any additional information you could provide would be helpful.

Regards,
Sandro

Erin I have over 20 custom tables in an application and I use a simple method to map the fields across and dynamically create custom table records. You could do this same type of work with a document type. The key is to have the field names the same in your source database and your target (Kentico) database. Take a look at this code. The part that gets the XML with properties from the class is ClassFormDefinition. It doesn't matter if its a custom table or a custom document type, all the "classes" are stored in the cms_class table.

        /// <summary>
        /// Creates an item for a custom table and dynamically adds the columns data based on the classinfo and row column comparison
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="Dci"></param>
        /// <param name="Row"></param>
        /// <returns></returns>
        public static bool CreateCustomTableItem(DataClassInfo Dci, DataRow Row)
        {
            bool okInsert = false;

            // Creates new Custom table item provider
            CustomTableItemProvider customTableProvider = new CustomTableItemProvider(ui);

            if (Dci == null)
            {
                throw new Exception("Data class info cannot be null.");
            }
            else
            {
                // Creates new custom table item object
                CustomTableItem newCustomTableItem = CustomTableItem.New(Dci.ClassName, customTableProvider);

                List<string> classProperties = new List<string>();
                // get the class definition
                var doc = XDocument.Parse(Dci.ClassFormDefinition);
                // get a list of all the tables properties by column value
                List<string> elements = doc.Descendants("field").Select(el => el.Attribute("column").Value).ToList();

                // got the class properties now compare
                foreach (string str in elements)
                {
                    // see if the class info contains the column in the data row passed in this method
                    if (Row.Table.Columns.Contains(str))
                    {
                        // contains the column so set a value
                        newCustomTableItem.SetValue(s, Row[str]);
                        okInsert = true;
                    }
                }

                if (okInsert)
                {
                    // Inserts the custom table item into database
                    newCustomTableItem.Insert();
                }
            }
            return okInsert;
        }

If you don't use this code, no big deal, but definately check out the cms_class.ClassFormDefinition table and field to get your field definitions.