Hi there,

I really need help here before I go mad!

On the left hand side of all my templates I want to display a small box with a random client comment.

STEP 1)

In the CMS I have set up a "Holder" page with the URL/ID "client-feedback-items". (This is a blank page)

The children of this holder use a page type which has three custom fields:

Quote (text)
Name (text)
Organisation (text)

I am using the following naming convention for each new child page: clientFeedback1, clientFeedback2, clientFeedback3 and so on.

The pages themselves are never displayed within the site structure (they are hidden from menu and search). Instead I want to display elements from them on most other pages (randomly picking one)

I have an include, called by most pages in my site, named RandomQuote.ss

This contains the following code at the moment:

<div id="quote">
<% control Page(clientFeedback1) %>
<p class="words">"$Quote"</p><p class="person">$Name, <br/>$Organisation</p>
<% end_control %>
</div>

This allows me to display the content of the first quote page.
If I changed it to <% control Page(clientFeedback2) %> it would display the contents of that page instead.
(This works so far...)

STEP 2) this is where I am coming undone!!!

I need to know how many child pages there are in the holder "client-feedback-items", then i need to pick a random number between 1 and the 'child count' of "client-feedback-items". I then have to return this value to the template page in order to display the random quote.

Here's how I've tried to go about it:

In the Page.php controller I added the following code: (idea was to count child pages then return a random number)

function pickRandomQuote() {
$upperLimit = $Children(client-feedback-items).Count; //count number of child items
$random = rand(1, $upperLimit);
$theRandomQuote = 'clientFeedback'.$random;
return $this->$theRandomQuote;
}

then I changed the code in RandomQuote.ss as follows:

<div id="quote">
<% control Page($pickRandomQuote) %>
<p class="words">"$Quote"</p><p class="person">$Name, <br/>$Organisation</p>
<% end_control %>
</div>

(Replacing the hard-coded ID with the variable/funtion: $pickRandomQuote)

For reason(s) that I don't understand it doesn't work. It's maybe something a bit obvious and stupid that I'm just not seeing (well, it's getting late now and I'm losing the will to go on!)

I also tried using:
$upperLimit = $Children.Count(client-feedback-items); //count number of child items

and just a hard-coded one:
$random = rand(1, 4);

to test if it worked or if the count code was wrong, but it still didn't work.

Any help would be much appreciated. I know I'm waffling on a bit, but its hard to explain it all!!!

Thanks,

L

Just bumping this up in the hope that someone can point me in the right direction...?

Heya,

I *hope* this is what you're after (to go in the Page Controller and called by $RandomChild on the template):

function RandomChild()
{
	// This returns 1 object (last argument) of QuotePages (your group of quotes) 
	// and the object returned is ordered randomly (RAND()) so it'll be random!
	$randomChild = DataObject::get("QuotePages", null, "RAND()", null, 1);
	return $randomChild;
}

In the template you should then do a control:

<% control RandomChild %>$Quote by $Author<% end_control %>

I must say that this would be much more efficient if you had a data-object of quotes rather than full pages. This tutorial goes into it really well:
http://doc.silverstripe.org/doku.php?id=tutorial:5-dataobject-relationship-management

I hope this helps :)

Thanks very much for your suggestions.

I'll try it out and I'll also have a look at the alternative version too. Need to do a bit more reading on this: am just trying to learn on the fly while I develop my first couple of SS sites, so I am probably missing a lot of cool functionality!

Cheers!

L
x

Let me/us know how you get on :)

Hi there,

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you. Project was on hold for a wee while.

I still can't get this to work. Keep getting errors and not sure how to fix them...

Am having a look at the data object info just now but i think its going over my head!!!

I take it back - I've just worked it out!!!

In this part:
$randomChild = DataObject::get("QuotePages", null, "RAND()", null, 1);

I was setting the $obj (which you had called QuotePages) to the name of the parent page, whereas it should have been the PageType!

DOH!

Thank you!

:)

... and if you want last 3...

class HomePage_Controller extends Page_Controller {
// Get random object
function getRandomProductObject() {
return DataObject::get('Product', null, 'RAND()',null,$limit=3);
}

}

Bye