Extension that promised so much but has fallen short

[ijs174940]

I like a lot other Webassist and old Interakt customers thought our prays had been answered by this extension, at last an extension that can make dynamic css menus! So after installing and having a closer look things are not what I expected and for my own use the extension still lacks the full dynamic features to make it fully usable for me.

1. For it to be fully dynamic it should be able to handle nested menus without having to to limit how many levels deep they go, how do we know how many levels our customers want to put into there site?

2. Only works from a db table there is no option to base it on a recordset. This restricts you to a single table and restricts the level of filtering of the data which is normally done by the recordset.

3. To adddress the above problem a filter has been added to the extension but this has been limited to only 1 filter. In menus that I have created the top level is filter by two options, first by level = 0 and viewable = Yes. With this option I cannot do this.

Considering that Interakt had an extension which offfered this and more nearly 4years ago I would have thought that you guys would have caught up and if anything surpassed it!. Come guys you know you can do better that this, please......

[Ray Borduin]

1) we did consider this, but DW doesn't support nested loops and we wanted to stick to using the DW recordset and repeat region when creating the pages, so we would have to travel outside of the available DW capabilities to accomodate this. This was left on the chopping block when implementing the last version, but could be added in the next if it is a common request.

2) The page created is based on a recordset. This is the benefit of the above decision. So although you can't use the wizard, you can easily edit the recordset on the include page after application to fully customize your query. We didn't want to "reinvent the recordset" in our interface, so we made sure to use one on the page that you can fully edit after the fact.

3) Again that is to integrate with the standard DW recordset... notice how similar it is to the "Simple Recordset" server behavior in dw. Open up the created include file and feel free to add as many parameters and complex query additions to the recordset used. You can add your nested loops as well (by hand since DW won't let you nest repeat regions) as long as you are careful to make the necessary css accomodations for those levels.

[ijs174940]

Thanks for the quick reply but I have noticed what appears to be a small error or oversite.

I am not sure about the nested loops issue as interakts version worked great with next to no intergration issues however I have had a look at the recordsets the extension makes and yes you are correct I can have a play with the recordset and can change it to fit my purpose but there is an error, example :

this is a copy of a simple rc made by the extension

mysql_select_db($database_toolkit, $toolkit);
$query_menuwriter_productcats = "SELECT ID, TITLE_NAME, VISABLE FROM product_cats WHERE VISABLE=Yes ORDER BY TITLE_NAME ASC";
$menuwriter_productcats = mysql_query($query_menuwriter_productcats, $toolkit) or die(mysql_error());
$row_menuwriter_productcats = mysql_fetch_assoc($menuwriter_productcats);
$totalRows_menuwriter_productcats = mysql_num_rows($menuwriter_productcats);


Where the first search condintion [Yes] is not enclosed by ' ' giving an mysql error on the page, each time I have to go back into the page and edit it by hand. This only appear when I use the "entered value" option in the filter.

[Ray Borduin]

What data type is that field? I think if you use: 1 instead of: Yes it might work properly.

[ijs174940]

I have tried VARCHAR & TEXT but both give the same result, at first I thought the extension would know if it was a numeric or text based entry and set the value accordingly like DW does, but as I said I tried it both ways but same result no ' '

[Ray Borduin]

It should behave like Dreamweaver... so this does sound like a bug with using the entered value setting. I will report the issue.

[ijs174940]

Ok thanks for taking a closer look I will just update it by hand until further notice.