Ditto DateSource not working...

Hi,

I’m using ModX 1.0.2 and Ditto 2.1.0.
I have a series of subpages which belong to a parent representing a month of the year e.g

- February 2010
-- page 1
-- page 2
-- page 3

- March 2010
-- page 1
-- page 2

and so on.

I’m trying to create a page which lists all the subpages when the parent page is visited using Ditto.
For each of the subpages there’s a template variable of type ’date’ with ’widget’ as UNIXTIME, called ’eventdate’.

My ditto code is:

And the template content is:


All the variables are being displayed fine on the page, and only the correct subpages are being displayed.
The problem is that the date isn’t being displayed at all no matter what I try.

The result at the moment is all dates are shown as:
Thursday 1 January 1970 12:00am

If I remove the dateSource parameter, and try to show the TV directly using [+eventdate+] (similar to [+itemcategory1+], which does work) then there’s no output.

Can anyone advise as to what’s going wrong, and if you need any additional info. I’ve spent the last 5 hours trying to figure this out.

Thanks in advance for all the help.

EDIT: I guess it’s useful to add, the same thing was working fine on ModX 0.9.6.3 and the problem started after the upgrade - no other changes were made. Also, I’ve tried disabling/enabling phx but it makes no difference.

what is `eventdate`?
if it’s a TV, have try this &dateSource=`[+eventdate+]`?
Did you or did you not fill the value of [+eventdate+]?
Thursday 1 January 1970 12:00am is the UNIXTIME first date/time, PHP usually auto-fills the blank DATE value with that.

Thanks for the reply.

Event date is a TV which is assigned to each of the subpages.
From reading the Ditto documentation, if assigned as the dateSource then the [+date+] placeholder in the template will refer to this date instead of the publish date.

If I leave the dateSource as default, and output [+date+] in the template then the correct publish date is displayed, which is expected.
As soon as I change to eventdate I get the problems.

I’ve tried your suggestion and it doesn’t work. I guess that was to be expected because at that point [+eventdate+] isn’t declared - it’s assigned to the subpages which need to be displayed by Ditto, not to this parent page which makes the call to Ditto.

Have try this?

<div class="item">
<h4><a href="[~[+id+]~]">[+longtitle+]</a> - [+eventdate+] [+itemcategory1+]</h4>
<p>[+introtext+]</p>
<p></p>
<p><a href="[~[+id+]~]">Click here for more info...</a></p>
</div>

Tried that too, and it shows no date at all, not even 1 January 1970.
It’s as if this TV isn’t being recognised by Ditto even though it exists and was working fine on ModX 0.9.6.3, although the sorting is done correctly if I use that TV to sort the results

I think I’ve got somewhere with this now, even though my solution might not be the "correct" one.

I noticed that normally timestamps are stored in the form YYYY-mm-dd H:m:s, but I guess because my site is UK based it was saved as dd-mm-YYYY H:m:s and therefore the date would never go through the date functions properly.

To solve it I created a custom snippet called stringtodate which converts the old format to a date in my desired format:


The widget couldn’t be UNIXTIME otherwise it wouldn’t work, selecting the null option did the trick.

I set a default format, though any valid date() format can be set using a parameter in the snippet call.
I can output my date using:

Hope this helps someone for now, and maybe there’s a more elegant solution on the way which handles the different date formats correctly.

how about your settings in Tools > Configuration > Interface & Features > Date format ?

It is set to dd-mm-YYYY which makes most sense to the client because they’re UK based. Plus there’s already a LOT of subpages which would need updating to the new date format though I suppose it could be done using a PHP/MySQL script to update all the relevant records.

The weird thing is it was working fine on the older ModX version, it’s the upgraded version with problems. I know the old version doesn’t have the option to select the date format, but in the date picker, it does appear as dd-mm-YYYY.

Hi,

I posted something quit the same a few days ago.

Have look to it plz. http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php?topic=60384

The point is that Ditto does not seams to parse A TV value (except the standard tv or pl coming from modx itself)
To use YOUR tv in the Ditto loop, try to use [+tvYourTvName+] in the call instead of [*YourTvName*]