[SOLVED] Calling single field from modResource object in an array?

This hurts, because it must be teeth-gratingly simple to do, but my PHP understanding is minimal, let alone MODx. I’m trying to replicate a randomQuote generator that appears elsewhere on the forums for Evo. It uses a deprecated call (getActiveChildren) so needs tweaking for Revo.

I can find and loop through all resources I need:


I can shuffle them, but I can’t seem to work out how to call an individual row of the array correctly.

I thought it would be this:


but it doesn’t seem to recognise the column heading ’introtext’ - I’m not referencing it correctly. I can’t find any examples that just want one item from a collection - or an example to output the contents of the whole array (ie what’s actually _in_ my $quotes variable), so I can’t easily see where I’m going wrong.

Help a noob out....

to print the content of the whole array you can do

That would print out the while xPDOObject, which you do not want to do.

It would actually be:

But that requires you know the actual id of the Resource.

You know you can do random quotes with getResources? &sortby=`RAND()` &limit=`1` ... ?

That would print out the while xPDOObject, which you do not want to do.

Yes. As I just discovered....

But that requires you know the actual id of the Resource.

Ahhh. I see. I had assumed that it wanted the number of the row number within the returned array. And thanks for your absurdly simple solution.

Could I just impose for two more quickies - as I’m almost certainly going to back myself into this corner again.

(1) The primary_key being the resource ID comes from the AccessibleSimpleObject then does it? (ie because the object I had created was a specific Object type, the array I had created wasn’t indexed by row number).

and (2) if I wanted to continue my original experiment - In order to find the resource ID, I would have to retrieve all the children IDs into a non-object array, and then use the RAND function on that new array, before returning to the original array armed with the primary key? (Which is my pseudo-understanding of what getResources does, but it would be good to have it confirmed).

Quote from: odeclas at Sep 27, 2010, 11:57 AM

(1) The primary_key being the resource ID comes from the AccessibleSimpleObject then does it? (ie because the object I had created was a specific Object type, the array I had created wasn’t indexed by row number).

Yes, it’s inherited from xPDOSimpleObject via modAccessibleSimpleObject.

Quote from: odeclas at Sep 27, 2010, 11:57 AM

and (2) if I wanted to continue my original experiment - In order to find the resource ID, I would have to retrieve all the children IDs into a non-object array, and then use the RAND function on that new array, before returning to the original array armed with the primary key? (Which is my pseudo-understanding of what getResources does, but it would be good to have it confirmed).

getResources sends an ORDER BY RAND() (using the config sample I showed you) and LIMIT 1 to the database as part of the SQL query, so there is no need to find an ID ahead of time, or return a huge result set for no reason. This is a much more efficient approach than trying to choose a random record from a large result set. In your original approach, you need to return all the possible results, then choose a specific record randomly and get the field you want; that’s a lot of wasted memory.