I have only just discovered asset listing by groups and I am having some trouble getting it to do what I want.
In the specific case I am using it for, I have a series of assets with children. The assets happen to be asset listings and the children are products, but I am assuming this detail is not important. One of the parents doesn't have product assets as children, it has further parent assets.
I would like the asset listing to display like this:
Cat 1
Subcat 1
Child 1
Child 2
…
Subcat 2
Child 3
Child 4
…
…
Cat 2
Child 5
Child 6
…
Cat 3
Child 7
Child 8
…
However, if I set up my asset listing with two levels of grouping I instead get this:
Subcat 1
Child 1
Child 2
…
Subcat 2
Child 3
Child 4
…
Cat 2
Child 5
Child 6
…
Cat 3
Child 7
Child 8
…
I'm not getting a tree structure.
Grouping won't give you a tree structure, it is only able to give you what you are seeing (assets in groups at a flat level). What you can do to list deeper content is use a nested content area in the type format of the asset being listed and nest another asset listing. This listing should be set with a dynamic replacement root node of SESSION variable with a value 'list_current_asset_id'. What this does is tell the nested asset listing to use the currently listed asset id from it's parent as the root node and lets you list out the children of whatever the parent is listing.
There can be a performance hit by doing this for large listings, but it should get you what you are after.
Hmmm, could you try using the Site Map asset and set the root node to above your groups?
I have another question. On the asset grouping page I have set the parent assets to order by name, but they aren't ordered properly. Am I misunderstanding something?
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I have another question. On the asset grouping page I have set the parent assets to order by name, but they aren't ordered properly. Am I misunderstanding something?
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Can you show us a link or screenshot?
This will order the parents. If you want to order the children, you need to go to the Asset Listings asset sorting screen.
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Can you show us a link or screenshot?
This will order the parents. If you want to order the children, you need to go to the Asset Listings asset sorting screen.
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This is what my settings are:
group settings.png (38 KB)
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This is what my settings are:
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That should work.
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That should work.
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It doesn't seem to be ordering things at all. The order is the same whatever I set for the sort by method, either ascending or descending.
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It doesn't seem to be ordering things at all. The order is the same whatever I set for the sort by method, either ascending or descending.
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Can you show us a screenshot of the page? Are you sure you are not thinking these settings will sort the children of the parent "grouped" asset?
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Can you show us a screenshot of the page? Are you sure you are not thinking these settings will sort the children of the parent "grouped" asset?
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I'm attaching a shot of the group headings. I have scrubbed the children from the list because there are so many of them. The children are actually sorted according a metadata field and are displayed just fine.
Group headings.png (22 KB)
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Grouping won't give you a tree structure, it is only able to give you what you are seeing (assets in groups at a flat level). What you can do to list deeper content is use a nested content area in the type format of the asset being listed and nest another asset listing. This listing should be set with a dynamic replacement root node of SESSION variable with a value 'list_current_asset_id'. What this does is tell the nested asset listing to use the currently listed asset id from it's parent as the root node and lets you list out the children of whatever the parent is listing.
There can be a performance hit by doing this for large listings, but it should get you what you are after.
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This is a very intriguing solution and I have been trying to implement it. I've got a couple of problems however.
The first problem is that the grouped asset listing naturally lists any subparents and the children of those subparents. If I am going to show the second tier in my tree using a nested asset listing, I'm going to need to prevent that second tier appearing in the top level grouped asset listing.
The second problem is that the parent with subparents doesn't have any child assets of its own apart from the subparents. It therefore isn't included in the grouped asset listing and hence the nested listing doesn't appear for this parent.
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I'm attaching a shot of the group headings. I have scrubbed the children from the list because there are so many of them. The children are actually sorted according a metadata field and are displayed just fine.
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Could you test another sorting option and see if that works?
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Could you test another sorting option and see if that works?
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All the different sorting options give the same ordering.
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All the different sorting options give the same ordering.
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Not sure what else to suggest, never had that feature not work. 
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Not sure what else to suggest, never had that feature not work.
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Thanks anyway. I'm not too worried about this particular list being in alphabetical order. And anyway, I'm sure the solution will pop up as I work on it. I've learnt a lot about a very useful tool during this discussion.