My first snippet

Hey,

I needed to find a way of only calling Wayfinder for a submenu if the current document had children, otherwise I wanted to offer some alternative content. My approach was to use 2 chunks...1 for if the snippet (my first ever snippet btw ;-)) found children (this chunk simply contains [!Wayfinder!] and one for no children...this simply contains the latest Blog entry. I’m not sure how to improve it...I don’t like



but couldn’t think of another solution to allow me to reference a chunk and leave a default value if no chunk is specified.

The snippet looks likes this:


I’ll look forward to any pointers in my (probably) very unorthodox coding

Cheers,
Taff

Might be better to use $modx->getChunk(’chunkName’) than the tags, which are meant to be used in HTML code. Otherwise, if it works, it’s the "MODx way"!

OK, I’m not sure why but initially it didn’t want to work, does now though

<?php
// ------------------------
// Snippet: hasChildren
// ------------------------
// [email protected]
//
// Thanks to ListChildOrSibs by [email protected] for giving me a basic understanding
// of how to accompish this

// A simple snippet (my first) to check whether the current document has children
// I created it for use with a sub navigation. If the document has children
// I call a chunk that contains [!Wayfinder!] otherwise I output a HTML chunk
// that contains something else...in my case the most recent blog entry
// Installation:
// Go to Resource => Manage Resources => Snippets & select "New Snippet"
// Paste the contents of this txt file into it and save
// Call it like
// [[hasChildren? &noChildChunk=`noKidsChunk`&childChunk=`foundKidsChunk`]]
// The chunks you define in this call omit the {{ and }}...I add them in the code
// for the main resaon that it wouldn’t work otherwise
// In it’s simplest form you can call [[hasChildren]] which will return a string
// ’Document has no children’ or ’This document has children’ depending.

//Check if Chunks were assigned as parameters when the snippet was called
//If not pass it a value of ’empty’
$noChildChunk = isset($noChildChunk) ? $noChildChunk:’empty’;
$childChunk = isset($childChunk) ? $childChunk:’empty’;

//If parameters weren’t passed then output a string telling the user
//whether the current document has children or not
if($noChildChunk==’empty’){
$none = ’Document has no children’;
}else{
$none=$modx->getChunk($noChildChunk);
}
if($childChunk==’empty’){
$some = ’This document has children’;
}else{
$some=$modx->getChunk($childChunk);
}

//Find children
// This line taken from the ListChildOrSibs by [email protected]
// so its probably the only one that is correct
$children = $modx->getDocumentChildren($modx->documentIdentifier,1,0,’hidemenu’, ’hidemenu=0’);

// If there are no children for the current page output negative
if (!$children){
$hc_Output=$none;
}else{
//otherwise output positive
$hc_Output = $some;
}
// end if children exist

// send to parser
return $hc_Output;
?>

I submitted it to the resources too. http://modxcms.com/hasChildren-0.2-1457.html

Think I will have to brush up on my PHP a little.

Thanks,
Taff

You want to list the children, or simply determine if there are children or not? To just find that out, there is a database field "is_parent", if that’s set to 1 then it has children.

My plan was to just find out if it had children.

I only want to display them though if the "show in menu" thingy is checked. That was my initial problem when I used getActiveChildren or whatever it was called.

Cheers,
Taff

Well, you could use a snippet that checks the is_parent field of document $docId, and if it is a parent, use

if it does have children. Wayfinder will already filter on the show in menu status for you.

Thanks, I will look into that