How to access directly fields and widgets from an Archetypes content

cookbook, Plone

There are two ways to access the field values and widgets from inside an AT content item.

First, a more complex example on getting fields and widgets properties using self.schema:

for fname in self.schema.keys():
    field = self.schema.get(fname)
    widget = field.widget
    widgetLabel = widget.Label(self)
    fieldValue = field.get(self))

To get a field value, one could use

 self.schema['customer_copy_to'].get(self)

The second way uses self.Schema() and shows the equivalent of the above example

self.Schema().getField('customer_copy_to').get(self)

Of course, there's always the default generated AT getters, but sometimes it's not possible to use those (for example, when you want to get the raw value of a field.