Attributes that get inherited by child pages

Permalink 1 user found helpful May 22, 2013 at 2:28 PM

The idea is fairly simple. I'm want to add an attribute to a page, and have that attribute get inherited by all associated child pages.

The end result is auto page categorization based off the site structure.

I could just add an attribute to every page manually, but that seems unnecessary if I can just set it once and automate it afterwords.

Here's an example to help visualize what I'm looking for:

- Home
- About
- Animals (selected attribute: "animals")
--- Cats (inherited attribute: "animals" / selected attribute: "cats")
------ Persian (inherited attribute: "animals" / inherited attribute: "cats")
------ Tabby (inherited attribute: "animals" / inherited attribute: "cats")
------ Maine Coon (inherited attribute: "animals" / inherited attribute: "cats")
--- Dogs (inherited attribute: "animals" / selected attribute: "dogs")
------ American Eskimo (inherited attribute: "animals" / inherited attribute: "dogs")
------ German Shepard (inherited attribute: "animals" / inherited attribute: "dogs")
------ Pug (inherited attribute: "animals" / inherited attribute: "dogs")
--- Horses (inherited attribute: "animals" / selected attribute: "horses")
- Contact

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I looked around and I thought this,http://www.concrete5.org/index.php?cID=329481&editmode=... , might be referring to what I'm looking for. But it was difficult to tell. I'm still not entirely sure but I didn't give that a try as it sounded a little too complex for my needs.

Thanks for the help!

A3020 replied on May 23, 2013 at 3:14 am Permalink Reply

What you *can* do, is hook into the on_page_add event. When a page is created, you can loop the parent pages and assign their attributes to the newly created page.

More info:http://www.concrete5.org/documentation/developers/system/events/...

roketto replied on May 29, 2013 at 12:38 pm Permalink Reply

Not a bad idea. I can see this being an issue if I decided to remove/change the parent page attribute, since the children wouldn't update along with the parent.

That being said, I would rather implement this than nothing.

Could you provide an example for how I would actually code this functionality using the on_page_add event?

Thanks!

A3020 replied on May 29, 2013 at 3:27 pm Permalink Reply

First you need to hook into the event. Once you've got that working, you receive the page object in your function as a parameter.

Use the 'getTrailToCollection' function to get all parent pages:http://www.concrete5.org/documentation/developers/helpers/navigatio...

I don't know how you set up your attributes, but you can simply use $page->setAtribute('name', 'value') to assign a value to a page and use $page->getAttribute('name') to retrieve one.