What can the dynamic parameters section be used for on asset listing pages?
They are used to dynamically set some paramters when the page is viewed.
For example, you can nest an asset listing in a design and configure it to use the currently displayed assets as the root node.
So lets say you have a bunch of products and they each have images attached under them, a single asset listing can be used that dynamically sets its root node based on what product is currently being viewed. The asset listing can be configured to list images and the current asset without you having to create one asset listing for each product.
You can also set the root nodes using query string variables to integrate the asset listing with other tools and systems.
Is there some documentation somewhere on dynamic parameters? They sound quite powerful, and very useful - but I'm clueless looking at the interface as to how to configure them.
The current system documentation is not written for 3.6.0 because it has not been released. So you'll have to wait a while for official documentation for those features.
3.6.0??? I thought dynamic parameters were included in 3.4.1. There is definitely a settings section for asset listings in 3.4.1.
Didnt think they were in 3.4 but they must be. There are certainly a lot of improvements in 3.6 then.
3.4 docos are already being written and should be out soon. No idea when "soon" is though. All I know is that they are actively being updated.
Greg,
as much as I'd love to get a full set of documentation on this, I am building a website as we speak and think that the dynamic parameters are going to help me greatly in the overall setup. Is it possible to get a real quick rundown on how it works (especially the "current asset" option for selecting a dynamic root node - I cant work out how "asset name", "asset short name" and "asset id" determine the root node).
Thanks,
Steve.
I'm not going to be any help to you. Can someone (Tom?) plese give a run down of this functionality.
I think maybe dynamic parameters for asset listing were in 3.4, and in 3.6 they will be available more widely (eg in the other listing assets and in asset builder).
The idea of dynamic parameters is that some aspect of the asset's setup can be controlled dynamically - rather than typing in a static value in the backend, you can set it up to draw the parameter's value from some runtime variable.
Currently the main dynamically-controllable parameter is asset listing root nodes. You can tell the asset listing to replace its statically-set root node with an assetid from the GET (ie the query string in the URL), the POST (data submitted from some HTML form that points to the listing page) or some aspect of the current asset. ("Current asset" only really makes sense when your listing page is nested in the design or something, and is not itself the main asset being printed.)
For security reasons dynamically-supplied root assetids will only be used if they are children of the statically-set one. If you specify several dynamic root node sources then the first one that exists will be used.
An example:
I have a site where there are a number of standard pages, and they each have a few images linked under them. I create an asset listing page that lists images and set its normal root node to be the site asset. Then I set up its dynamic parameters section to look for a replacement root node in a GET variable called images_source.
I can then put a link in my design, say, like this
See a listing of images under this page
Does that help?
Tom
Tom