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Sort Tool: last-published-on

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espanae

Jun 24, 2011 @ 09:53 PM

I wrote a Velocity script to view our most recently published pages (using an index block). The report starts off as anticipated, in chronological order, but after a while the dates start going out of order. The script is attached. Did I do something wrong?

• recently-published.vm 1.01 KB

1. 1 Posted by Charlie Holder on Jun 25, 2011 @ 04:04 AM

   

   Can you attach a sample of XML data that this format is processing as well as the HTML outcome you're getting as output?

   • Edit

2. 2 Posted by espanae on Jun 28, 2011 @ 05:30 PM

   

   Sure.
   You'll notice the System Pages are correctly in chronological order (correctly) but then start repeating: http://union.edu/_dev8080/reports/recently-published/standard-content/

   It's running against an index block (content type) which I've attached. I also attached an updated version of the Velocity script with comments.

   Thanks for your help.

   • content-index-block.xml 327 KB
   • content-index-block.gif 20.9 KB
   • recently-published.vm 1.32 KB
   • Edit

3. 3 Posted by Charlie Holder on Jul 03, 2011 @ 06:26 PM

   

   Oh man. This one was tricky to diagnose.

   I don't really know why nor do I understand the implications inside Cascade, but not all of the system-page nodes contained in your sample XML have a last-published-on node. I think that because the Velocity Format can't find the node to sort on with the $_SortTool call some weird stuff is happening. I'm sorry I personally cannot offer some more concrete advice. I will bump this thread to support for an internal discussion and then maybe they can offer something more detailed.

   With all that said, I was able to achieve a properly sorted page by adding a filter to the initial $_XPathTool call. The filter only includes pages that have a last-published-on node.

   I also made one (small) additional change to the Format. Instead of having the #if statement inside your #foreach loop, you can filter out the pages that belong to the "development" Site in the initial $_XPathTool call similar to the previous paragraph.

   Here's a copy of the Format I ended with. Please let me know if you have any questions.

   ## // Get all System-Pages sorted by date published.
   
   #set ( $sys_pages = $_XPathTool.selectNodes($contentRoot, "/system-index-block/system-page[last-published-on][is-published='true'][site!='development']") )
   $_SortTool.addSortCriterion("last-published-on", "", "number", "descending", "")
   $_SortTool.sort($sys_pages)
   
   
   ## // Style the table with CSS
   
   <style>
   thead th    { text-align: center; font-weight: bold; }
   td th       { margin-left: 10px; margin-right: 10px; }
   </style>
   
   
   ## // Table headers
   
   <table style="width:900px;">
   <thead>
       <tr>
           <th>Last Published Date</th>
           <th>Last Published By</th>
           <th>Link</th>
       </tr>
   </thead>
   
   
   ## // For each System Page, create a table row
   
   #foreach ( $page in $sys_pages )
   
       #set ( $by = $page.getChild("last-published-by").value )
       #set ( $on = $page.getChild("last-published-on").value )
   
       <tr>
           <td>$_DateTool.format("MM/dd/yy hh:mm:ss a", $_DateTool.getDate($on))</td>
           <td>
               #if ( $by != "" ) ${by} #else N/A #end
           </td>
           <td>
               <a href="${page.getChild("link").value}">
                   ${page.getChild("path").value}
               </a>
           </td>
       </tr>
   
   #end
   
   
   ## // Close the table tag
   
   </table>
   

   • Edit

4. 4 Posted by espanae on Jul 05, 2011 @ 03:06 PM

   

   Charlie, thank you for resolving the issue.
   I'll keep you posted if I notice any other "weirdness" with our data.

   • Edit

5. Charlie Holder closed this discussion on Jul 26, 2011 @ 06:00 PM.