Hi,
I'm creating an asset listing for a staff directory. Each person has a Standard Page with metadata that is used for the Asset Listing page. So now I have a big long list of everyone's photos and details. I want to create an A-Z, so the alphabet is across the top and people can click on the letters.
On page 47 of the Asset Listing manual it says that when you use the A-Z grouping, the Short Name field is used to sort the assets. But when I apply the A-Z grouping it is clearly using the regular Page Name.
This is a problem because the Page Names are all like Dr John Smith and Dr Jane Jones, so there are loads of letter Ds! But I don't want to change the Page Name to just their surname because then the page itself would just show the surname, instead of the whole name.
I have considered changing the page name to Jones, Dr Jane - is this the only way? Or should the Short Name be able to work somehow?
Thanks,
Hannah
I have an update to this question. I've tweaked some bodycopies and can now list everyone with their full name (Dr John Smith) but in alphabetical order by surname. But now that I've applied the A-Z functionality I see that it initially only displays the people starting with A. I would have thought it was pretty standard to show one long page of everybody and the A-Z hyperlinks act as bookmarks. Can I get it to work like this? And if not, can I manually build some A-Z bookmarks even though my content is an asset listing, not a normal page?
A-Z hyperlinks are not anchors but the link with the query string.
Here is my suggestion but it might not be the best one.
First you need to group the list. To do that you need extra metadata field to store the grouping information, for example, Dr John Smith's page will have one metadata value of 's'. This has to be done to each staff page manually.
Then set up an asset listing page(A), group the staff standard pages with that metadata field, format the group body with the linked anchor; after that set up another asset listing page(B) which only prints linking anchors with the group name(the metadata), this asset listing page will be the alphabet list on the top.
Finally nest these two into one standard page, listing B above listing A.
After all I don't think it's good idea to load all the staffs info altogether, which makes the page heavy.
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A-Z hyperlinks are not anchors but the link with the query string.
Here is my suggestion but it might not be the best one.
First you need to group the list. To do that you need extra metadata field to store the grouping information, for example, Dr John Smith's page will have one metadata value of 's'. This has to be done to each staff page manually.
Then set up an asset listing page(A), group the staff standard pages with that metadata field, format the group body with the linked anchor; after that set up another asset listing page(B) which only prints linking anchors with the group name(the metadata), this asset listing page will be the alphabet list on the top.
Finally nest these two into one standard page, listing B above listing A.
After all I don't think it's good idea to load all the staffs info altogether, which makes the page heavy.
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Thanks for that. sounds complicated!
It's a shame that building a directory like this makes the page too heavy to show as one list. What about people who know the title but not the name of the person? They have to click through every letter instead of just scan their eyes down the page looking for the relevant words. Bit of a usability issue there.
H
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What about people who know the title but not the name of the person?
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You could also implement a search page asset in this case.
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You could also implement a search page asset in this case.
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ok, thanks. it all seems to be getting a but unnecessarily complicated!
This is because of the web accessibility. For a simple but not good solution, try something like jQuery on-page filtering function(Google it). It's quick, cool and easy to implement but not accessible to those JS-disabled users.
Hopefully this suggestion will be helpful and not continue down the path of unnecessary complication.
If you organise your pages under folders named by the alphabet you can group your asset listing by the folder, in the grouping screen you can then put an anchor. You can automatically generate the a-z links to the anchors by nesting a second asset listing at the top of the page that lists the folders and constructs the link to the anchor or you could manually code it if you want. If you use a listing to generate the a-z links the whole lot would be dynamic so you could only create folders where necessary instead of creating folders for the whole alphabet that would be listed but actually have nothing in them. By making it dynamic you wouldn't have to worry about updating the a-z links as it would be handled for you. If you made your anchor link dynamically construct of the group name, %asset_name% would probably be the keyword you want, all you would need to do from then on would be to add new pages to the folders when new people come on and new folders when you need them and not have to worry about updating anything from then on.
I am sure Nic could also suggest some nice JS that could generate the a-z link list from the anchors in the page too :)
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I am sure Nic could also suggest some nice JS that could generate the a-z link list from the anchors in the page too 
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Actually, I have this in mind already! http://www.ihwy.com/labs/Demos/Current/jquery-listnav-plugin.aspx
bookmarked
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Hopefully this suggestion will be helpful and not continue down the path of unnecessary complication.
If you organise your pages under folders named by the alphabet you can group your asset listing by the folder, in the grouping screen you can then put an anchor. You can automatically generate the a-z links to the anchors by nesting a second asset listing at the top of the page that lists the folders and constructs the link to the anchor or you could manually code it if you want. If you use a listing to generate the a-z links the whole lot would be dynamic so you could only create folders where necessary instead of creating folders for the whole alphabet that would be listed but actually have nothing in them. By making it dynamic you wouldn't have to worry about updating the a-z links as it would be handled for you. If you made your anchor link dynamically construct of the group name, %asset_name% would probably be the keyword you want, all you would need to do from then on would be to add new pages to the folders when new people come on and new folders when you need them and not have to worry about updating anything from then on.
I am sure Nic could also suggest some nice JS that could generate the a-z link list from the anchors in the page too
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thanks I will try this. Though now I'm a little concerned about the page being too "heavy". Argh, decisions!
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thanks I will try this. Though now I'm a little concerned about the page being too "heavy". Argh, decisions!
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You are not the first:) That is why there is a lot of caching and triggers to release the cache and put it back into cache so that the dynamic side of listing doesn't get lost;)
but only if you set them all up to…
[quote]
Hopefully this suggestion will be helpful and not continue down the path of unnecessary complication.
If you organise your pages under folders named by the alphabet you can group your asset listing by the folder, in the grouping screen you can then put an anchor. You can automatically generate the a-z links to the anchors by nesting a second asset listing at the top of the page that lists the folders and constructs the link to the anchor or you could manually code it if you want. If you use a listing to generate the a-z links the whole lot would be dynamic so you could only create folders where necessary instead of creating folders for the whole alphabet that would be listed but actually have nothing in them. By making it dynamic you wouldn't have to worry about updating the a-z links as it would be handled for you. If you made your anchor link dynamically construct of the group name, %asset_name% would probably be the keyword you want, all you would need to do from then on would be to add new pages to the folders when new people come on and new folders when you need them and not have to worry about updating anything from then on.
I am sure Nic could also suggest some nice JS that could generate the a-z link list from the anchors in the page too
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"If you organise your pages under folders named by the alphabet you can group your asset listing by the folder, in the grouping screen you can then put an anchor."
Hi again, I'm not sure how you use the Grouping Screen to put anchors to each of the folders??
Also, I'm sure that JS is amazing, but I'm just a lowly comms advisor with no IT background and it's a bit intimidating for me! thanks, tho
After changing your list format to "custom grouping" in the details screen you then go to the grouping screen of the asset listing. Add a new group level "at the top level" of type "parent asset".
Now set;
Restrict Types - Folder
Direct Parent Only ? - checked
Sort By - short name
sort order - descending (I think, reverse it to ascending if it is wrong)
Now expand the "Group Formats" folder under the asset list and go to the edit screen of the "Group Level 1 Format". You can put whatever you want in here to set up each group, like group name etc. To create an anchor you can inset an anchor using the wysiwyg and use %group_name% as the anchor name or you could hand code the anchor yourself if you are using a html container. The anchor that you would get through the wysiwyg will look like
%group_name%in the html. The key is to use something specific to the group. Theoretically the group name is the parent asset name which would be the folder, so a folder named "A" would give you an anchor like
A
Now you would either hand code your links at the top of the page or nest another asset listing at the top to create them for you.