TDAndT

I recently had to use an object as the source for a grid.  The requirement was to have the headers be clickable to sort the columns in ASC and DESC.  Typically this is simply a matter of ordering the rows with the SQL query and using the J! framework JHTML::('grid.sort'...) to do the heavy lifting with Javascript.

However, this time, the data was not stored in orderable table columns but in a JSON data store and embeded in a single column.  The model would decode the data before passing it to the view to display it.   The model had to be to sort the object by different passed criteria before passing it to the view.

I found a great start on php.net usort page from user Lea Hayes.  I only had to modify the function with a strnatcmp instead of the listed strcmp to be able to sort on numbers and strings.

function sort_on_field(&$objects, $on, $order = 'asc') {
     $comparer = ( $order === 'desc')
          ? "return -strnatcmp(\$a->{$on},\$b->{$on});"
          : "return strnatcmp(\$a->{$on},\$b->{$on});";
      usort($objects, create_function('$a,$b', $comparer));
}
      ...
      $order = $this->app->getUserSateFromRequest(...);
      $orderDirection = $this->app->getUserStateFromRequest(...)
      ...
      $this->sort_on_fields($this->_data, $order, $orderDirection);

A slight hickup was getting the pagination to work correctly. The fix was to check the old header values with a getUserState() call against the newly specified value with the getUserStateFromRequest() method and then resetting the $limitStart variable if it changed.

Ran into a problem today working with the K2 Category display and the JPlayer video plugin.

Videos for the items in the category should be viewable when displayed on the category list but they still showed the <flv>...</flv> tags.  I use the JPlayer plugin to display videos (sometimes, other times I use the boVideos viewer... don't ask!)

Netbeans debugger showed that the JPlayer's 'onPrepareContent' plugin was being called correctly but it was expecting the item text to be in the text attribute!  K2 places the text in the fulltext attribute when calling the plugin from the category view but passes it in the text attribute when passing from the item view ???

Wrote a quick hack to the JPlayer content plugin to create a temp variable to  check the fulltext attribute  to see if it is populated (from the category view) otherwise use the text attribute (from the item view):

$text = (($article->text != null) AND ($article->text != '')) ? $article->text : $article->fulltext; 
if (preg_match($regex, $text) == FALSE) {

    return;
}

Also had to change the bottom of the function to check whether to replace either the $article->text or $article->fulltext attributes!