Grouping without using Tags
We had a problem. We needed to create Announcements, that needed to be part of a Type category, and also a Department. I had built this all using tags, but this quickly became a problem, as there is really no support for tagging in asset builders or the front end editing interfaces. Tags can be added and removed with triggers, and also passed a dynamic variable, but there still was no way to show the name of the tag that a specific asset had, and there way also no way to know if that tag had really been added or removed.
I decided that I needed to take a different approach to this. I looked into using the linking manager, which in the end turned out to be an amazing asset. Our users are first taken to an asset builder, there they have a choice of two create locations. The first is required, as it is the "Type" of Announcement, this will set which category it will go into. The second create location is not required, and is used to set a "Department". This will be used to show relevant Announcements on Department pages. The create locations for "Type" are just folder assets, while Standard Pages are being used as the create locations for the Department categories. (There is a reason for this which I will explain further down.)
Once the user fills out the required info on the page, they are taken to the Admin area for Announcements. One big challenge was how to show which "Type" groups, and which Departments each Announcement was linked under. For this I used two nested asset listings in the type format. The asset listing uses dynamic parameter, with a session variable of list_current_asset_id for "Replacement Managed Asset for the listing". The asset listing is then set to look up the tree 1 level, so that the listing will see all of the parent assets that it is linked to, on level 1. (This is why I used Folders for the "Type" category, and Standard Pages for departments, because I wanted to keep those two separate, so we let the two different asset listings separate the lists by linked asset type.) So when both of these asset listings are printed, they show under each category, which section they are linked under. Each Announcement can be linked under multiple Types and Departments. If the user wants to change they they just click the button which takes them to a link manager page, which allow them to add or remove links. When they return to the Announcement Admin, their changes are shown. We also show how many links each Announcement has in each section.
Post a Comment