Creating an add-on "product type book" for ZC 1.5

[philou]

Hi Oldcat,

of course you are aware that some browsers already provide part of the functionality you describe: You click once on the pop-up with the author names, so the pop-up stays open and then you just start typing on the keyboard and the pop-up highlights entries which begin with the letters you type. Hitting ENTER selects what is highlighted in the popup. In Firefox this works, although I do not know if this works when you enter japanese characters. This will only pick up the first characters so if you look for "Osamu Tezuka" you can only find it by typing "Osam.." not by typing "Tezu…"

Maybe you can do it this way until there is a full search functionality in BookX.

Best wishes,
P.

[oldcat]

Hi philou,
Thank you very much for your really useful suggestion.
I have not been aware of this browser's functionality until today.
I tried it and found that it does not work with Japanese/Chinese characters.
So I have made some "dummy" authors for index with alphabetical characters.
It really works and It does shorten my search time.
I will make a donation to your cat.
Thank you again.

Best Regards,
oldcat

[philou]

Hey Oldcat,

many thanks for your donation!

I'm happy you have a method that works – great idea to insert "dummy" authors :)

Best regards,
philou

[suportafaceri]

Hello,

I have another question. I use Multisite modul and it has a function that you can show some categories on one site and other on other site. It uses a function called cat_filter by witch it filters the products (for sideboxes and search). Does anyone have an idea how or where i should try to use this function so that it does the same for the filter sedebox function of bookx?

[suportafaceri]

I forgot to mention that the sidebox bookx filter is working in this maner, only the function that shows all books by the same author doesnt work, as it shows all the books asigned to that author, not just the ones asignet to the current store.

[philou]

Hi sup,

can you give a bit more info :
If you filter for a specific author "Joe" with ID 42 in the BookX sidebox, then it shows correctly all books by "Joe" assigned to your current store, is that right? (The URL should reflect the use of the author filter like for example "YOURSHOP.COM/index.php?main_page=index&typefilter=bookx&bookx_author_id=42")
Does the multisite plugin add another filter to the URL at this point?

If you choose the entry "show all authors" in the bookx filter, there is the link "Show books by Joe" after author "Joe". If you click on this link, then it shows all books by Joe for all stores? Does this exactly describe the problem? If yes, then what does the URL look like? Because in my development shop system it shows exactly the same URL as the filter pop-up in the example above, so if it is different, that could be a problem.

Let me know what the situation is with that, or if it is another point where "Show all books by author" is not working.

Regards,
p.

I forgot to mention that the sidebox bookx filter is working in this maner, only the function that shows all books by the same author doesnt work, as it shows all the books asigned to that author, not just the ones asignet to the current store.

[suportafaceri]

So, another of my rushing thru things. The Advanced search is the one that works as when i search for an author it only shows the products of the respective author for the curent site.
The bookx filter doesn't care about my category alocation and shows all the products by that author.
I tryed al kinds of places to put the cat_filter in but to no avail.
The statements used in the Advanced search for the category filtering is

$listing_sql = cat_filter($select_str . $from_str . $where_str . $order_str);

and an example used in the "New product listing"

$check_products_all = $db->Execute(cat_filter($products_new_split->sql_query));

Do you have any idea what and where to change someting to make this work?

[philou]

Hi sup,

sorry, but I'm not really an expert on how the multi-site plugin works. Here are two thoughts:
There is a bookx function which runs on all pages that list multiple products and it is in YOUR CATATALOG/includes/classes/observers/class.bookx_observers.php. The function is called update_product_listing_with_bookx_attributes and around line 454 there is this:

$listing_split = new splitPageResults($listing_sql_new, MAX_DISPLAY_PRODUCTS_LISTING, 'p.products_id', 'page');

You could try adding your cat_filter there. Possibly this results in the cat_filter being called twice during one execution of the script, once here and once inside the product listing template, I don't know.

The more restrictive call to cat_filter could be placed inside YOUR CATATALOG/includes/index_filters/bookx_filter.php around line 122 there is $listing_sql = 'SELECT ' . $select_column_list . $select_table_list . ' WHERE ' . $select_where_conditions . $alpha_sort; which is only called when there is a BookX filter active.

Attention: When a bookx filter is active, the filter code above is called first, and then the observer code is called as well a bit later, so adding cat_filter in both places means it will be called twice by BookX when filters are active.

Hope that helps you along!

Regards,
p.

[suportafaceri]

The first statement for the observers solved the problem with the sidebox.
This is the modified statement in case some one else needs it:

$listing_split = new splitPageResults(cat_filter ($listing_sql_new), MAX_DISPLAY_PRODUCTS_LISTING, 'p.products_id', 'page');

The problem with the Books by the same Author in the product description page was solved by adding the cat_filter in the template tpl like this:

echo cat_filter($authors_related_products_html);

Thank you verry mutch for your help and if you need testing with new versions of your module you can count on me.

[philou]

Hi,

I'm happy to hear that it works. It is quite surprising that this should fix something:

echo cat_filter($authors_related_products_html);

Since "echo $authors_related_products_html;" simply outputs the HTML previously assembled by the PHP code further up in the bookx_product_info file. I don't see how the cat_filter function is able to go through that HTML and decide which books don't fit the categories of your site. Are you sure that you didn't do something else as well?

Anyway, if it works then there's nothing to complain :)

Regards,
p.