Why would .getTitle() in Anguilla sometimes not return a title?

Question

Leaning rather heavily on Chris Morgan's WebdavURL bookmarklet, I set out to make one which would copy the human-readable path to an item (which might be preferred by non-techies in documentation)

A quick detour to the anguilla documentation found me the methods .calculatePath() and .getTitle() - a quick regex-strip and all would be good.... here's the code (with some added whitespace goodness)

javascript: (function (UI, B, e, a, r, d) { 
    try { 
        while (r = UI.frames[e++]) { 
            if ((a = r.$display && r.$display.getView()) && a.getId() == B) { 
               d = a; break; 
            } 
        } 
        var m1 = window.top.frames[1]; 
        var itemId = d.getMainInterface().getListSelection().getVersionlessIds()[0]; 
        var item = m1.$models.getItem(itemId); 
        if(item != undefined) { 
            item.loadWebDavUrl(); setTimeout(function() { 
                var itemPath = item.calculatePath()
                      .replace(/^\\Content Management/, "")+"\\"+item.getTitle(); 
                alert(itemPath); 
            }, 400); 
        } else {  
            alert('Please select an item...'); 
        } 
    } catch (x) {
        alert('Please select an item...');
    }; 
})(window.top, 'DashboardView', 0) 

Unfortunately, while .calculatePath() works like a dream, .getTitle() seems only to work some of the time, so on other occasions I just get 'undefined' for the title. So far, I have not been able to identify, say, a particular item type that is doomed to failure. It appears to be random, no matter how alien a world-view this may be for me.

I would love to blame Tridion (maybe select is broken), but I fear it is my own interpretation of scripture that is at fault. Can anyone steer me from the rocky path of waywardness?

Answer 1

loadWebDavUrl doesn't actually load other properties. So you are getting inconsistent results based on whether or not the item has already been loaded.

To solve it, you'll need to call load() on the item instead and wait for the "onload" event to fire. Then the title will be freshly loaded and available.

Alternatively, you could try just using the static title instead (which is probably available since you selected the item in a list)

Answer 2

Apart from @Peter answer, I want to add some more points to it.

To get title of an item, you can write as follows:

var title = item.getTitle() || item.getStaticTitle();

With this line of code, you will always get the title either from the cached or from the loaded item.