Best approach to a content-only alternative page view

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jrotering Reply #1, 13 years, 3 months ago

One of our sites is going to start offering its pages' content through an external portal site that will load them as an overlay iframe. In other words, they want to put links on the external portal that link to our site pages, but load them in an overlay window. They want to load versions of our pages that just include the page title and content. My thought is to write a script that looks for a query string value like "contentonly=true" and if it finds it, serves the simple version of the page. (I already have a snippet that runs at the start of all my templates, so I could easily add this check to that snippet). I would like to write code that (if contentonly=true):

loads a simple HTML structure (either from a template or a chunk; I'm not sure which would be better)
loads the values for *pagetitle and *content into those fields in the chunk/template (I think this just means parsing the template/chunk, right?)
Sends the results of the parsed simplified template/chunk as the value for the requested resource (rather than processing anything else in the "normal" calling of the resource

Does this make sense? I want to write a test that looks for a given value in the query string, and if it finds it, delivers an alternative version of the resource's content and stops the normal processing of the resource.

Has anyone done something similar? Any pointers or recommendations?

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Mark Hamstra Reply #2, 13 years, 3 months ago

You might like InstantAPI for that: http://modx.com/extras/package/instantapi

It basically loads up the page as a JSON object instead of parse it through the template, which means that the external portal site could load the JSON, and get access to the individual fields and a parsed content blob.

Mark Hamstra • Developer spending his days working on Premium Extras and a MODX Site Dashboard with the ability to remotely upgrade MODX and extras to make the MODX world a little better.

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BobRay Reply #3, 13 years, 3 months ago

InstantAPI sounds good. I don't think your approach will work because you're still going to get the all the HTML code in the template, which will have to be there in order for the page to work normally.

The only other thing I can think of is (if the $_GET variable is set) have your snippet set a $_SESSION variable with the page ID and forward the user to another page that has an empty template and no content other than a snippet tag for a snippet that reads the $_SESSION variable, gets the resource object, calls toArray() on it and uses the results to return a processed Tpl chunk. Something like this (untested):

[[!CheckContentOnly]]

<?php
/* CheckContentOnly snippet */
if(isset($_GET['contentonly] && ($_GET['contentonly'] == 'true'))) {
    $_SESSION['docId'] = $modx->resource->get('id');
    $url = 'http://url/of/content-only/page';
    $modx->sendRedirect($url);
}
return '';

[[!ShowContentOnly]]

<?php
/* ShowContentOnly snippet */
$output = 'Resource not found';
$docId = $_SESSION['docId']'
$doc = $modx->getObject('modResource', $docId);
if ($doc) {
    $fields = $doc->toArray();
    $output = $modx->getChunk('MyTpl', $fields);
}
return $output;

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Bruno17 Reply #4, 13 years, 3 months ago

something like that?
https://forums.modx.com/forums/thread/15204/change-template-on-the-fly#dis-post-82229

the ajaxswitch - snippet could be much simpler and you can wrapp it with getCache then.

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jrotering Reply #5, 13 years, 3 months ago

Actually, now that I've slept on it, I think with my current template paradigm, it will be quite easy. My templates look more-or-less like this:

[[setTemplatePlaceholders?&outputChunk=`html_2_0`]]

setTemplatePlaceholders does a bunch of stuff (mostly obvious by the title), and then returns the named chunk. It should be fairly trivial to test for the 'contentonly' value, and just return a different chunk containing the simple HTML structure.

The way my templates are set up has some other problematic issues that need to be addressed (namely load times), but in this case it comes in pretty handy.

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jrotering Reply #6, 13 years, 3 months ago

I added this to the top of my 'setTemplatePlaceholders' snippet:

if ($_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'] == 'content.mydomain.com') {
	return $modx->getChunk('ContentOnly');
}
else {
 // all the existing code from the snippet
}

I decided to go with an alternate hostname/alias rather than the query string method. I also use the hostname in setting the base href value; this way if someone clicks on a link from a content-only page, they get the content-only version of the next page.

I also had to change the setTemplatePlaceholders snippet call to run it uncached.

It is working great now.

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BobRay Reply #7, 13 years, 3 months ago

I'm glad you got it sorted.

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