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[ZAP]

I'm having a hard time getting just the latest document from a series of folders... The documents are news articles, and they're organized in subfolders by year. Unfortunately, instead of creating them from oldest to newest, we started with the new ones and worked back, so we can't use createdon usefully (note to self: from now on always add dated material beginning with the oldest!).

The folders are like so:

• 2008 (68)
• 2007 (67)
• 2006 (65)
• 2005 (64)
• 2004 (63)
• 2003 (62)
• ...and on back to 1998, but that doesn't much matter

and each article within these subfolders has an alias based on its date (e.g., "10-03" or "02-12").

So I thought I could just grab all of the docs in each of these folders and sort them first by parent id and then by alias, and that would always give me the latest article (matching a tag, etc.). But it's not working as I expect. I'm getting documents from the oldest folders first.

This is my Ditto call:

Code:

[[Ditto? &parents=`68,67,65,64,63,62` &summarize=`1` &total=`1` &tpl=`newsblurb` &paginate=`0` &alwaysshow=`1` &sortBy=`parent,alias` &sortDir=`DESC` &displayArchive=`0` &depth=`1` &trunc=`0` &tagDelimiter=`,` &tagData=`tvtags` &tagMode=`onlyTags` &tags=`[*menutitle*]`]]

Anyone understand why this is happening (and even better how to resolve it or get the results that I need using some other method)? I guess I could go back through them all and add  published dates and sort by those, but I'd really rather not have to do that. There's gotta be a way to make this work!

[Mark]

In Ditto 2.1, you need to use the &orderBy field to sort by mutliple parameters. So, you should remove &sortBy and &sortDir and use &orderBy=`parent DESC,alias DESC`. Then it should sort first by parent id and then by alias.

[ganeshXL]

Maybe you could also use this query http://modxcms.com/lastUpdate-1558.html and add a WHERE clause (WHERE parent=n1 OR n2 OR n3).

Installing the latest Ditto version is certainly a better idea though

[ZAP]

In Ditto 2.1, you need to use the &orderBy field to sort by mutliple parameters. So, you should remove &sortBy and &sortDir and use &orderBy=`parent DESC,alias DESC`. Then it should sort first by parent id and then by alias.

Sweet! I was just using the old parameters (even though I have the latest Ditto). Thanks as always for the quick help!

[ZAP]

Rats! It's still not working for me. I have Ditto 2.1 (latest from the repositories), and my call is the following:

Code:

[[Ditto? &parents=`68,67,65,64,63` &summarize=`2` &total=`2` &tpl=`newsheadline` &paginate=`0` &alwaysshow=`1` &orderBy=`parent DESC,alias DESC` &displayArchive=`0` &depth=`1` &trunc=`0` &tagDelimiter=`,` &tagData=`tvtags` &tagMode=`onlyTags` &tags=`[*menutitle*]`]]

What's odd is I'm getting exactly the opposite of what I'd expect: The oldest articles instead of the latest (it does seem to be ordering by both parent and alias, but not the way I want it to). I tried changing DESC to ASC to see if that helped, but it didn't make any difference. Could there be a bug in the way that the sort order is parsed out of the orderBy parameter?

[Mark]

Could you please provide the Ditto debug data?

[ZAP]

How do I get the debug console to work? I set debug to 1 and I get Open Debug Console and Save Debug Console links where my Ditto call is, but the open link just shows the same page in a pop-up and I can't figure out where the save link saves anything. What am I missing?

[Mark]

Give an uncached call a try.

[ZAP]

Can I just say how incredibly slick that debug console is? Dang! The data is attached.

EDIT: Original attachment had an incorrect parameter that I was using temporarily.

[Mark]

According to your debug output, Ditto is properly sorting both in DESC order. Can you try removing the tagging parameters and see if things work?

[ZAP]

When I remove the tagging parameters, I get the latest documents from the oldest folder (year). Meaning instead of showing the last two articles from 2008, it displays the last two from 2004. And if I change the parent sort order to ascending (as in the snippet call below) I get even stranger results: the oldest two articles from the the oldest folder (as if both sorts were ascending).

[!Ditto? &parents=`68,67,65,64,63` &summarize=`2` &total=`2` &tpl=`newsheadline` &paginate=`0` &alwaysshow=`1` &orderBy=`parent ASC,alias DESC` &displayArchive=`0` &depth=`1` &trunc=`0`!]

[ZAP]

*BUMP!* This still isn't working for me, and the client finally noticed. Any idea why I'm getting such wacky results?

[rthrash]

Try switching "&summarize" (deprecated) with "&display". What's &total for?

[ZAP]

Thanks for the tip. I usually just copy my old Ditto calls and modify them, and since the parameters change so often I almost always have at least one outdated variable name in there. As far as I understand it, &total sets a limit on the number of documents retrieved from the database (as an MySQL LIMIT), which I would think would just speed up the query a little bit.

When I remove &total and replace &summarize with &display, I get the latest documents matching my tags but from the oldest parent folder. I think that it's just ignoring the parent part of the orderBy value entirely, because it doesn't matter if I make it ASC or DESC (I get the same results). My snippet call is:

[!Ditto? &parents=`68,67,65,64,63` &display=`2` &tpl=`newsheadline` &paginate=`0` &alwaysshow=`1` &orderBy=`parent DESC, alias DESC` &displayArchive=`0` &depth=`1` &trunc=`0` &tagDelimiter=`,` &tagData=`tvtags` &tagMode=`onlyTags` &tags=`[*menutitle*]`!]

If I can't get this fixed soon I'm going to have to write a custom snippet to do it instead, and that would make me very sad ...

[rthrash]

You might PM Mark on this one. Not one of those MySQL 5.0.51 installs by chance is it?

[ZAP]

I'm not actually sure what version MySQL is on this server because it doesn't report the version number properly. It was 4.0.2.6 and I asked the admins to update it so that I could install Pommo. They did and Pommo let me install, but phpInfo() is still reporting 4.0.2.6.

But I assume that your basic ORDER BY syntax in queries has to be working, or I'd have all sorts of other problems...

I may bug Mark and see if he's had a chance to look at this more closely. I hate to be pushy, especially since he already answers a zillion support threads every day. I guess I should go through the Ditto code as well and see if I can figure it out.

[Mark]

Give tonight's development version a try. It should fix the issue. It seems a few lines of the orderBy parser got transposed a few commits back...

[rthrash]

FYI, I'm committing the same changes to the SVN trunk for the release. It will be labelled something other than Ditto 2.1 I suppose...

[ZAP]

Excellent! Using the new ditto class file fixed it. The only difference between the file I had and the new one were those couple lines that were transposed, but that was the root of the problem.

Why is it always some little detail that causes most major programming problems?

THANKS for tracking it down for me!