[Zope] Newbie Question: Ordering items within a folder based on a property

28 Mar 2002

      Everyone:

I know that this has come up over and over on the list, I just still 
can't get a handle on it. If I could get some good information from the 
list, I would like to put together a HOW-TO on this, because I think 
it's a common goal. I have folders that contain folders and other 
objects. I want to build a menu along the lefthand-side that shows all 
the folders with an attribute 'publish' defined, and, we'll show their 
'nickname' or 'displayname' properties in place of 'title_or_id' if 
those are defined. So far, this is easy.

However, we also want to arbitrarily sort the folders and while the 
below code works, it doesn't do exactly what I want. We define an 
integer property 'sort_value', then sort based on sort_value and 
alternatively title_or_id.

This works, sort of:

  id       sort_value

Folder1 (100)
Folder2 (200)
Folder3 (300)
    FolderA (not defined)
    FolderB  (1)
    FolderC  (2)

The folders in Folder3 will be sorted as

    FolderB (1)
    FolderC (2)
    FolderA (300) <--- inherited from Folder3 above.

This is not awful, but I know it's not the right way to do things. How 
can I improve it?

Thanks to everyone involved with Zope! Sorry to be so dense,

Ben Chapman

  --- START SAMPLE CODE ---

<dtml-comment>

Menu builder version one. This is confusing. Even though I tell it to 
build this list from the objectValues in the current folder 
(PARENTS[0]), it still inherits sort_value from above when it's
doing a sort. I'm not sure how to turn off sort_value. I'm not sure how 
this would affect us very often, but it is still less than ideal.

BJC 03/26/2002

</dtml-comment>

<dtml-in expr="PARENTS[0].objectValues(['Folder','TUFolder','Photo 
Folder','TULawPerson','Squishdot Site'])"
     sort="sort_value,title_or_id"
     skip_unauthorized
     >
     <dtml-if publish>
      <p><a class="menu" href="&dtml-absolute_url;"
            title="&dtml-sort_value;">
      <dtml-if "hasProperty('nickname')">
        <dtml-var nickname>
      <dtml-elif "hasProperty('displayname')">
         <dtml-var displayname>
      <dtml-else>
        <dtml-var title_or_id>
      </dtml-if nickname>
      </a></p>
     </dtml-if publish>
    </dtml-in folder tufolder photofolder>

--- END CODE SEGMENT ---

-- 
Benjamin J. Chapman   benjamin-chapman@utulsa.edu   918/631-2405
Director of Computing Resources  TU College of Law
http://www.utulsa.edu/law/support/
Send computing support requests to: support@mail.law.utulsa.edu