Making Ditto show every third document?

Hello,

I need to figure out how to display a list of news, on an information-monitor. (like in airports etc)

So I have 3 divs, 3 boxes, where I want the news to be displayed. And then I want each box to fade in and out when it switches to the next piece of news. (Say, I have 9 pieces of news, and want to display them on 3 boxes, one at a time)

The question is how to do that best.

I don’t want the same piece of news displayed twice on the screen, ie. in box 1 and 3 etc. So using random is out, as the amount of news won’t be far above 10. So the odds are too big.

I’m thinking that if I make 3 ditto calls, and then if I can make ditto call 1 display news 1, 4 and 7, and ditto call 2 display 2, 5 and 8, and ditto call 3 display 3, 6 and 9 - then it should work fine.

However... how can I accomplish this? Or am I missing a much simpler way of doing it? I could make 3 containers, but this will require my users to judge which container to put the document in. I’d like it if they don’t have to worry about that.

This may have appeared confusing... let me know if you need any clarification. Thankyou in advance.

Create a snippet that returns an array of the last 10 news articles. Then you can set up the snippet to output news the way you describe bellow but simply having a switch statement that return the IDs for the news. You then use an input parameter to determine which statement will be returned. Hope this makes sense.

You would use it something like this:

[!Ditto? &documents=`[[returnNewsDocs? &state=`1`]]` &tpl=`...`!]

As always with MODx, there’s several ways to swing a cat... you could try using the start parameter (i.e. offset): http://ditto.modxcms.com/files/snippet-ditto-php.html#start

[!Ditto? &start=`0` &display=`3`!]
[!Ditto? &start=`3` &display=`3`!]
[!Ditto? &start=`6` &display=`3`!]

Thankyou Ganesh, that’s a good way to swing a cat Hadn’t seen that parameter, thanks a lot.