CMS Made Simple Forums

Hi

I reckon I am possibly missing something fairly simple here and if so, sorry in advance.

I have developed a listing of bands using CTL Module Maker.  I need to categorise these by Genre, Location, Price Range etc.  All of these having descreet values and bands can be in more than one Genre, and available in more than one location.  Each band is in at least one Genre, at least one location and at least one price range.

What I can't seem to get my head around is any way to get the Search function in CTL to filter on all bands belonging to a particular parent category.  So for example to have a search form with a drop down for each of Genre, Location, PriceRange, where the user could select options for one or more and then get search results.

I suppose there are 2 elements I am having difficulty with.

Is there an easy way to get the Search to create a Dropdown or Multiselect input in place of the current text input?

Is there an easy way to get the search function to search on Parent category?

I am sure someone has been in a similar situation and I'm hoping that I am missing a workable solution.

Thanks in advance

Alastair

Yep

I may have been being a bit thick here.  If anyone has answers to the questions above I'd still be interested in hearing them but I think I have found a solution.  By making Genre, Location, Price etc. dropdown fields rather than categories they get added to the search automatically.  Now I just need to get the search to list them as dropdowns instead of multiselects and find a way to browse by location (since it is no longer a category)  I am guessing I can do that with the Queries functionality.  Might be a bit of a hack but it looks like it will work.  Any other options are still very welcome if anyone has been through this before.

Ok.  So here's hoping someone can help me with this.

I have set up the Module with Genre, Locations, Price as Options Fields.  I have added an action to the module that allows me to list all the Genres, Locations etc so that I can get a browsable structure. 

Now all I need to do is to link each option to a list of Bands matching that Genre or Location etc.  I think I ought to be able to do this by creating a link that calls the Search action of the module but I have no idea how to do this.

Anybody got any ideas?

Basically, I have a list of Genre names (Rock, Country, Punk etc) and for each one I need to generate a link that goes to the search results generated by the search module if I were to select that Genre from the search field.  Does anyone know whether this is possible?

I hope that makes sense cause I am banging my head against a brick wall here on something that is probably fairly simple.

Argh.

Can you show me as link?

I would like to see what you have so far. And then maybe I understand what you want.

Hi,
Some people will get tired of this answer, but: this will all be possible in the 2.0 release...

if Genre, Bands and Location are higher-level elements (parents), you can have such links, but otherwise with the current version you can't. Normally, parents should appear in the search form, but either in the form of a hierarchy or only with the immediate parent. So it isn't a good solution for you.
If you use dropdown fields, you solve your search problem, but can't have the browse link. There should be (and will be in the future) a browse-by-field action, but with the current version there isn't, and although it isn't hard at all to program, I'm afraid you'd have to do it yourself...

Pierre-Luc

Thanks for the response.

That is basically what I ended up doing alright.  Wrote enough to allow browsing by the various dropdowns.

Nice to know that I didn't miss anything really obvious.

Nice module by the way.