[plugin] [ORPHAN] sed_pcf: Packed Custom Fields.

sparkybarkalot · 2007-08-05 16:25:43

I’m running TXP 4.0.5 and sed_pcf_if_value is failing on me. I’m getting errors saying that ‘custom’, ‘section’, and ‘variable’ aren’t attributes of sed_pcf_if_value. I’ve triple checked my tag code, even copying and pasting the code directly from this thread in case I was misyping something, but still getting those errors.

Anyone else having this problem and / or have any suggestions?

Thanks for a really, really nice plugin.

net-carver · 2008-01-02 08:05:35

All

version 0.3 is available.

It adds the sed_pcf_for_each_value tag which acts as an iterator over a CSV field. It’s based on wet_for_each_image so if you know how powerful that is you’ll see the advantage of the new tag.

Available from the download page in normal and compressed formats.

pieman · 2008-01-30 22:59:07

Hello

Would I be right to say that you can only retrieve values associated with pre-defined names using this plugin?

I’ve already posted what I’m trying to achieve here, but the crux of it is that my ‘names’ can’t be set beforehand, and I’d like to output both these variable ‘names’ and associated values in a definition list.

thanks
Stu

net-carver · 2008-01-31 05:46:08

Stuart

Sorry, it doesn’t currently do what you want — it only gets/tests data via a known name.

I’ll think about putting an iterator in for name-value pairs that will operate in a similar way to the new sed_pcf_for_each_value tag.

pieman · 2008-01-31 07:04:14

OK, thanks anyway. If you find the time to add that later I’d find it really useful.

pieman · 2008-02-11 20:17:18

Hello Steve

I abandoned the previous search, but I have a new problem! I’m trying to use sed_pcf_for_each_value, but so far I’ve not been able to output anything.

I have an article which contains 4 valid article IDs in a custom field called related-article-IDs. In my article form I have

<txp:sed_pcf_for_each_value name="related-article-IDs"><txp:article_custom id="{value}" form="article_nav" /></txp:sed_pcf_for_each_value>

and in the article_nav form
<li><a rel="bookmark" title="read full article" href="<txp:permlink />"><txp:title /></a></li>

One thing I’m not sure of in the help, is that for sed_pcf_for_each_value you specify an attribute called ‘name’ to hold the custom field to access, whereas in the other tags you’ve used ‘custom’ as the attribute. Is that deliberate? I’ve tried both just incase, but no luck yet.

Hopefully I’m doing something obviously wrong. Any help appreciated.

cheers
Stu

ps. there’s a typo there too:
3. As an enclosing tag… <txp:sed_pcf_for_each_value>... your stuff here...<txp:sed_pcf_for_each_value />
the trailing slash should be at the start of the closing tag I think…

pieman · 2008-02-11 20:21:17

I should point out a couple of things

the custom field holds a simple, comma separated string 16,18,20,21
the txp:sed_pcf_for_each_value code isn’t written an article form, but pulled from another form which is called with the txp:output_form tag, so I don’t think it’s an issue with articles within articles. I’ll investigate this further though just incase

Bloke · 2008-03-01 20:00:52

Steve

Only just got round to trying this excellent plugin out. I was getting close to running out of custom fields and this has saved the day, woohoo!

Couple of things I spotted with v0.3.108:

It doesn’t mention that you need sed_plugin_library in the docs as far as I can see
When I did install the library, the plugin still failed with an invalid call to sed_lib_extract_packed_variable_section(). Looks like you’re intending to rename the functions in a later version of the library(?) I grabbed v0.2 from your site so, unless I missed something, I manually renamed the function calls for now
Might be worth mentioning that the custom field names should be all lower case (i.e. if the field was defined as My Field you require custom="my field" in the plugin. It may even be "my-field", I don’t know). I’m not entirely sure but I think this automatic lower-casing behaviour occurred in 4.0.5 or 4.0.6 cos it caught me out in my plugins

Anyway, kudos to you yet again. Another blinding plugin. Many thanks.

Last edited by Bloke (2008-03-01 20:01:41)

candyman · 2008-03-01 20:15:49

I’d like to have custom fields related to the forms, eg:

Forms: Film review

Book-related fields: Title, Director, Actors, Kind of support (DVD, VHS…)

Form: Book review

Book-related fields: Title, Author, Editor, N° of pages…

And so on…

How can I make them appear accordingly to the forms I like? Maybe with this plugin can I obtain this?
How it should be the code for many some book-related fields, for example?

Thnaks in advance.

Last edited by candyman (2008-03-01 20:17:48)

Bloke · 2008-03-02 08:55:33

candyman wrote:

I’d like to have custom fields related to the forms, eg:

Not quite related to forms as such, but if you pack your book-related fields into one custom field and your film-related fields into a second custom field, and put your film review articles in a different TXP section to your book review articles, you could use sed_section_fields to display the relevant custom field in the back-end.

If you pack your custom fields like this:

meta(title='Our story';author='Him';editor='Me';pages='42')

on the public side you could have some conditional logic in the form that displays your articles like:

<txp:if_section name="book_reviews">
 Author: <txp:sed_pcf custom="books" section="meta" variable="author" />
 ...
<txp:else />
 Director: <txp:sed_pcf custom="books" section="meta" variable="director" />
 ...
</txp:if_section>

There are probably better ways of doing it, but does that help at all?

candyman · 2008-03-02 09:29:55

Thank you Bloke but, I haven’t understand some steps.

I’m trying to get a multi author blog with different sections. One section is film review, another is book review and the last one is music review.
I created the sections named cinema, book and music in order to have, for example, the following kind of urls:

http://mysite.com/film/review-of-film

I created many custom fields with the glz_custom_fields plugin in order to obtain more custom fields than 10 and to use some radio buttons (for the rating) and so on, like:

Author
Director
N° of pages
N° of minutes
N° of tracks
rating
etc…

Then I, think, I should use the sed_section_fields plugin to make appear in the write tab only the fields useful to the relative section.

For example: when I use the “cinema form” I’ll make appear the Director, N° of minutes and the rating only and NOT, for example, the N° of pages (that should appear instead, with the rating and the Author fields, when I use the “book form”).

So, I’d like to know if, using the sed_pcf: Packed Custom Fields plugin, should be a good idea. May this plugin can avoid the use of different forms?

I haven’t understood the use of packaged custom fields like:

meta(title=‘Our story’;author=‘Him’;editor=‘Me’;pages=‘42’)

Where should I specify them? I’ve read the documentation but I haven’t understood the way.

Thanks in advance for all your help.

Last edited by candyman (2008-03-02 09:37:30)

Bloke · 2008-03-02 10:42:49

candyman

Your approach sounds great and very logical.

sed_pcf is used for packing more data into a custom field than just one item. Normally one custom field = one “thing”, like Director, No of Pages, etc. This plugin’s only really of use if you use custom fields a lot and you don’t use any other plugin to extend the built-in limit of 10. It sounds that if you are using glz_custom_fields to obtain more than 10 (I didn’t know it did that as well!) then sed_pcf is not necessary.

But if you do decide to pack more than one “type” of information into a single custom field, this is how you do it:

Decide on a name for your custom field; something that is generic enough to encapsulate all the data you want to put in it. So, taking the “film review” example, instead of having separate custom fields for No of Pages, No of Minutes, No of Tracks, you could pack them into a single custom field called “Duration” or “Quantity” or something like that (I’ll choose “Quantity” for this example)
In each Film Review article, populate the custom field called “Quantity” with data like this: pages(num='92')|mins(num='126')|tracks(num='8'). There are a variety of ways of specifying the data inside a custom field, detailed in the sed_pcf help. So an alternative might be: info(pages='92';mins='126';tracks='8'). Parts of a custom field separated by ‘|’ characters are called “sections” (a trifle confusing :-) and anything to the left of an ‘=’ is called a “variable”
In your forms, you “extract” information from within a given custom field. If you use the 1st syntax from step 2 you would pull out the running time of the film like this: <txp:sed_pcf custom="quantity" section="mins" variable="num" />. That would display 126. If you chose the 2nd format you would use: <txp:sed_pcf custom="quantity" section="info" variable="mins" />

So you see it is rather flexible and is limited only by how much information you want to “pack” into each custom field. There is a third “simple” syntax which is just a comma-separated list: 92,126,8. I’ve not used that one yet so I’m not sure how easy it is to get at the data; I suspect it is solely for iterating over the contents of the custom field using sed_pcf_for_each but I’m not sure. And there are also “if” tags in the plugin so you can take action depending if a custom field contains a certain variable or section, which may reduce the number of forms a little.

Like I say, if you’re using glz_custom_fields then you probably don’t need sed_pcf.

Is that any clearer?

Last edited by Bloke (2008-03-02 10:45:00)

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#13 2007-08-05 16:25:43

Re: [plugin] [ORPHAN] sed_pcf: Packed Custom Fields.

#14 2008-01-02 08:05:35

Re: [plugin] [ORPHAN] sed_pcf: Packed Custom Fields.

#15 2008-01-30 22:59:07

Re: [plugin] [ORPHAN] sed_pcf: Packed Custom Fields.

#16 2008-01-31 05:46:08

Re: [plugin] [ORPHAN] sed_pcf: Packed Custom Fields.

#17 2008-01-31 07:04:14

Re: [plugin] [ORPHAN] sed_pcf: Packed Custom Fields.

#18 2008-02-11 20:17:18

Re: [plugin] [ORPHAN] sed_pcf: Packed Custom Fields.

#19 2008-02-11 20:21:17

Re: [plugin] [ORPHAN] sed_pcf: Packed Custom Fields.

#20 2008-03-01 20:00:52

Re: [plugin] [ORPHAN] sed_pcf: Packed Custom Fields.

#21 2008-03-01 20:15:49

Re: [plugin] [ORPHAN] sed_pcf: Packed Custom Fields.

#22 2008-03-02 08:55:33

Re: [plugin] [ORPHAN] sed_pcf: Packed Custom Fields.

#23 2008-03-02 09:29:55

Re: [plugin] [ORPHAN] sed_pcf: Packed Custom Fields.

#24 2008-03-02 10:42:49

Re: [plugin] [ORPHAN] sed_pcf: Packed Custom Fields.

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