Child asset count keyword or solution?

Squiz Matrix Support
1

Matrix Version: 5.4.5.1

I’m trying to build an asset listing of sites on a server, and looking to output how many child assets each site has.

AFAIK, that’s going to require a second nested asset listing that simply returns the asset count from a listing of the site’s assets.

Does anyone have a better way? The %asset_num_kids% keyword exists for the Asset Map, but doesn’t work in listings…

2

And is this a new error?

[22-Jul-2019 15:26:19 Pacific/Auckland] PHP Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 60 seconds exceeded in /home/websites/mysource_matrix/packages/cms/listing_engine/listing_engine.inc on line 3148

3

Not a new error, but that timeout is the reason why “Nested asset listing” doesn’t really work as a way of counting descendent assets. I’m not aware of any programmatic ways to count how many assets are under an asset that are fast enough to be practical.

When I need to check manually, I go to the Permissions screen and acquire the locks to check how many assets would be cascaded to. This is fast-ish (direct query on sq_ast_tree I assume), but I don’t know how you’d go about getting that same info as part of a generated listing (short of using a DB Connection and replicating that query yourself).

4

Thanks John. Ideally, I want to be able to have this listing available to non technical management in case they want to check numbers provided to them.

I’ve put in a squizmap to make asset_num_kids available, and I’d rather avoid the DB Connection if I could but really need something operational real soon now.

5

I just realised I may have misread the original question - are you counting direct children or all assets under a site assets?

If you only need direct children, then %asset_children_link_type_1_2^count% should do the job.

6

The latter unfortunately. Some of the sites are relatively complex, and we’ve had a past problem of people not really grasping how many assets some of our hosted sites contain.

7

In that case %asset_num_kids% isn’t what you need. In the asset map use case %asset_num_kids% only counts direct children, not all descendants.

You’re probably stuck with trying to make the nested asset listing fast enough to avoid the timeout.

8

Will “Asset counter report” do the job for you??

https://matrix.squiz.net/manuals/reports/chapters/asset-counter-report

9

The site asset listing works reliably enough, and without hitting the timeout. The child listing that returns an asset count works well on one site or for a small selection but the number of assets (292K+) on one of our two servers is I think the tipping point - the full combined report is running ok on the server with only ~40k assets.

That report works well to give me a combined total for each server. Per site is a bit more work - we have two servers and the larger server has 150 live sites, which makes running a report for each site a little time consuming. I’m working to reorganise the sites on that server so I can generate totals for sites owned by particular organisational units.

10

Could the Javascript API be usable for what you want? It has getChildCount and getChildren functions:

https://matrix.squiz.net/manuals/web-services/chapters/javascript-api#getChildCount
https://matrix.squiz.net/manuals/web-services/chapters/javascript-api#getChildren

2 Likes
11

Resurrecting this thread (hopefully) to ask, if %globals_asset_children_link_type_1^count:[asset#]% will display the number of type 1 kids of the named asset, I’m guessing it will not care about status. Is there something that’ll count type 1 live assets? Manual says no…

12

Hi @kentst

Depending on what type of asset status you’re trying to exclude, users with different access will get different results from your keyword replacement. A user with admin access will get the count for all assets they have access to, including archived and under construction. A user with read access will get a count for Live, Safe Edit etc.

It’s pretty easy to test this out.

13

Thanks @MelFreeman. One of the team here reminded me that “public” users will see a count of the live assets only, as that’s all they have permission to see, so %globals_asset_children_link_type_1^count:[asset#]% would work in my use case.

However a colleague also mentioned that %globals_asset_children_link_type_1:<assetid>^as_asset:asset_status_code^contains:16% should work for everyone as status code 16 = live.