ask if TV is empty

hey there!

this is my very first php coding. so be easy on me ;-)

ok. i got a TV (file) that lets me upload and place a swf. the TV is called [*flash*]. now i want to create a snippet that puts the swf embed code into the template when i insert a swf via the TV or not if i don’t.

so i created following code to check if the TV is empty or not:


the result is "Variable Exists", even if i leave the TV blank.

Then I tried to make a workaround, checking the length of the string. If I leave the TV blank it returns the nr 9 ????????

I also tried to check if it is an empty string:


but no success as well.

how can I solve my problem?

best
firewireflow

Yeah, the main problem here is this line:

MODX won’t parse the TV in PHP code when the TV is specified like that, you’ll need to use the MODx API to programatically get the TV output from the database. You could look at $modx->getTemplateVar() and $modx->getTemplateVarOutput(). (Check in the docs/wiki for info on what arguments you need pass into these functions).

The count returns 9 because PHP is literally counting the number of characters in ’[*flash*]’ - which is 9

Try something like this:



What is the output you want? You could use it in a chunk and display the chunk $modx->getChunk($chunk);

There is also a snippet named TVConditionals that can handle this for you and you can also do it with PHx. Plenty of choices with MODx.

thanks ... but its still not solved ... i don’t really get it. although my TV text field is empty i still get output "Variable exists".

here is what i want to do:

i got a big picture on every page of the website. this is part of the design. when i edit a document i want either to have a picture or a swf file. so when i insert a swf it should dynamically write the code for the swf and the other way around. so i need to check what if the TV’s are empty or not.

how do i achieve that?

my thought of asking if the var’s length is below 1 might work, right? what do i do wrong?

thanks a lot
best
firewireflow

Yeah, using dev_cw’s code and then checking the var length should do what you want to do.

dev_cw’s code is not working for me for some reason. if i echo it, it displays "Array"

this is getting really confusing!

I am sorry, I do this all the time

you need to change this:


to this:


The problem is that it returns an array and you need to access the specific TV within the array, thus the $flash[$tv]