Is there a way to sort a content query by the value of a field programmatically? - sorting

I'm working on a portal based on Orchard CMS. We're using Orchard to manage the "normal" content of the site, as well as to model what's essentially data for a small application embedded in it.
We figured that doing it that way is "recommended" for working in Orchard, and that it would save us duplicating a bunch of effort in features that Orchard already provides, mainly generating a good enough admin UI. This is also why we're using fields wherever possible.
However, for said application, the client wants to be able to display the data in the regular UI in a garden-variety datagrid that can be filtered, sorted, and paged.
I first tried to implement this by cobbling together a page with a bunch of form elements for the filtering, above a projection with filters bound to query string parameters. However, I ran into the following issues with this approach:
Filters for numeric fields crash when the value is missing - as would be pretty common to indicate that the given field shouldn't be considered when filtering. (This I could achieve by changing the implementation in the Orchard source, which would however make upgrading trickier later. I'd prefer to keep anything I haven't written untouched.)
It seems the sort order can only be defined in the administration UI, it doesn't seem to support tokens to allow for the field to sort by to be changed when querying.
So I decided to dump that approach and switched to trying to do this with just MVC controllers that access data using IContentQuery. However, there I found out that:
I have no clue how, if at all, it's possible to sort the query based on field values.
Or, for that matter, how / if I can filter.
I did take a look at the code of Orchard.Projections, however, how it handles sorting is pretty inscrutable to me, and there doesn't seem to be a straightforward way to change the sort order for just one query either.
So, is there any way to achieve what I need here with the rest of the setup (which isn't little) unchanged, or am I in a trap here, and I'll have to move every single property I wish to use for sorting / filtering into a content part and code the admin UI myself? (Or do something ludicrous, like create one query for every sortable property and direction.)
EDIT: Another thought I had was having my custom content part duplicate the fields that are displayed in the datagrids into Hibernate-backed properties accessible to query code, and whenever the content item is updated, copy values from these fields into the properties before saving. However, again, I'm not sure if this is feasible, and how I would be able to modify a content item just before it's saved on update.

Right so I have actually done a similar thing here to you. I ended up going down both approaches, creating some custom filters for projections so I could manage filters on the frontend. It turned out pretty cool but in the end projections lacked the raw querying power I needed (I needed to filter and sort based on joins to aggregated tables which I think I decided I didn't know how I could do that in projections, or if its nature of query building would allow it). I then decided to move all my data into a record so I could query and filter it. This felt like the right way to go about it, since if I was building a UI to filter records it made sense those records should be defined in code. However, I was sorting on users where each site had different registration data associated to users and (I think the following is a terrible affliction many Orchard devs suffer from) I wanted to build a reusable, modular system so I wouldn't have to change anything, ever!
Didn't really work out quite like I hoped, but to eventually answer the question in your title: yes, you can query fields. Orchard projections builds an index that it uses for querying fields. You can access these in HQL, get the ids of the content items, then call getmany to get them all. I did this several years ago, and I cant remember much but I do remember having a distinctly unenjoyable time with it haha. So after you have an nhibernate session you can write your hql
select distinct civr.Id
from Orchard.ContentManagement.Records.ContentItemVersionRecord civr
join civ.ContentItemRecord cir
join ci.FieldIndexPartRecord fipr
join fipr.StringFieldIndexRecord sfir
This just shows you how to join to the field indexes. There are a few, for each different data type. This is the string one I'm joining here. They are all basically the same, with a PropertyName and value field. Hql allows you to add conditions to your join so we can use that to join with the relevant field index records. If you have a part called Group attached directly to your content type then it would be like this:
join fipr.StringFieldIndexRecord sfir
with sfir.PropertyName = 'MyContentType.Group.'
where sfir.Value = 'HR'
If your field is attached to a part, replace MyContentType with the name of your part. Hql is pretty awesome, can learn more here: https://docs.jboss.org/hibernate/orm/3.3/reference/en/html/queryhql.html But I dunno, it gave me a headache haha. At least HQL has documentation though, unlike Orchard's query layer. Also can always fall back to pure SQL when HQL wont do what you want, there is an option to write SQL queries from the NHibernate session.
Your other option is to index your content types with lucene (easy if you are using fields) then filter and search by that. I quite liked using that, although sometimes indexes are corrupted, or need to be rebuilt etc. So I've found it dangerous to rely on it for something that populates pages regularly.
And pretty much whatever you do, one query to filter and sort, then another query to getmany on the contentmanager to get the content items is what you should accept is the way to go. Good luck!

You can use indexing and the Orchard Search API for this. Sebastien demoed something similar to what you're trying to achieve at Orchard Harvest recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7v5qSR4g7E0

Related

Ember sorting/filter table

I am looking to add a filter/sorter table into the application. I need to choose which column can be sorted - and provide change of class glyphs up/down arrows on the columns. The filter box also needs to be outside of the table.
I tried looking at this example, but there are no glyph class changes on the cols and the filter box is inside the table.
http://crodriguez1a.github.io/ember-sort-filter-table/
I looked at this custom solution, but I couldn't see a way of locking the filter to specific cols.
http://www.jarrodctaylor.com/posts/Filter-And-Sort-Tables-In-Ember/
http://emberjs.jsbin.com/yezonaxu/12/edit?html,css,js,output
what about this one -- http://onechiporenko.github.io/ember-models-table/v.2/docs/classes/Components.ModelsTableRowFiltering.html
but the problem here - is how to create some custom markup depending on the data.
You could sort and filter your rows using computed properties. For sorting you could use sort macro. For filter you should implement your own logic, cause filter and filterBy macros does not support observing a value used to filter the array. Use the sorted and filtered rows to generate a simple HTML table or pass it to a table component of your choice.
If you will take DataTables and wrap it in ember component (custom code would work better that some generalized 3rd-party wrapper), you can achieve a lot. Including filtering by columns. It's a bit hard way, though - DataTables is big and it's API is a bit complicated. That's if you want client-side filtering.
For server-side filtering approach would be different - you render UI for filters using ember's methods, convert user's choices to string and pass that to API (which should be modified to support filtering) when asking for data.

Check if Associated View is blank in Dynamic CRM Online

In CRM Online on a customer form is there anyway that you can check if the Associated View for Assets is blank? And if its blank change a field value based on it.
Using JavaScript, 2 ways:
The associated grid is showing records related to your primary record. You can perform the same query the grid is doing using REST which will tell you if there are any records. You can then count the records, and change the field value as required. This approach is better if there are records in the database but which aren't shown in the view for some reason, e.g. view filters.
Access the Grid objects data using getRows(). As above you can then count the records, and change the field value as required. The downside of this is I believe those methods only give you access to the records shown on the form (and not any hidden by filters but still in the database) - but I don't think that that will be a problem here.
Worth bearing in mind that this approach only works client side, e.g. someone has to be actually looking at the form.
If you need to cover the a non-client side approach, e.g. workflows creating records, then you should probably look at plugin development so the changes can be performed server side.
As a side if you just want a simple count shown on form you then you should probably look at Calculated Fields and in particular Rollup fields. You might also be able to run further client side JavaScript from the count.

Search in default_collection minus a specific collection

In our GSA index of 500K documents half of the documents are coming from an internal bug tracking system.
We have been hearing some power users complain about results from the bug tracking system pushing down other useful results from many other sources.
We discussed about using result biasing to lower the importance of bug tracking documents but I am not very keen on this approach as I believe we should let GSA do its magic and decide on the relevancy of the results.
Instead what I want to provide users as an option is a UI (checkbox for each collection) where they can pick what collections they want to perform the search.
My non-default collections does not include everything that is under the default_collection. So when user checks each and every checkbox they may think that that is everything in the index while it is not.
Because of this I want the checkboxes to behave as exclude rather than include (i,e. check to exclude this collection).
Finally my question: Is there a way to search in the default collection but filter out results that belong to a specific collection (bug tracking collection).
When you want to use multiple collections you do &site=col1|col2|col3..
What I am after is something like &site=default_collection-col1 (that's a minus in between).
Is there a way to do this?
Any alternative approaches to this problem?
Personally, I would rethink the design of your collections and build more modular collections that you can include. That way as you mentioned you can include OR queries in your site include.
http://www.google.com/support/enterprise/static/gsa/docs/admin/70/gsa_doc_set/xml_reference/request_format.html#1076953
A less ideal but more specific solution to your problem is going to be do an exclude by URL in your search query, be aware this can appear in results query search box and looks ugly, but this can be fixed using a simple XSLT change.
To exclude results for a specific site (http://www.google.com/support/enterprise/static/gsa/docs/admin/70/gsa_doc_set/xml_reference/request_format.html#1076964) I would use this sparingly and opt for better design of the collections.
By far the best way to do this is in your collection config. Just create a new collection that has the same include pattern as your default collection and add the pattern from your bug tracking collection as an exclude pattern.
There's no way to do what you're asking purely using query parameters unless you list out every individual collection using the '|' except the one you want and then you're likely to run in to URL length issues.
Update your frontend to exclude the url patterns mentioned for the bugtracking collection.
check this url on your box
http://yourGSAEnterpriseCcontroller:8000/EnterpriseController/serve_remove.html

optimizing ajax based search

I am doing a ajax based search which suggests the values from the database tables as the user inputs fields in the search box. It does work but its really very slow, takes more than 10 seconds minimum for any suggestions to load. how do I optimize this to make it fast..
Like Index it/save it in cache/crawl?
Right now autoSearch() js function is fired which retrieves data from the related table to load the suggestions. how do I make this faster?
I dont know if this will make a difference but I am using grails/groovy for application development.
Thanks
Priyank
Have you added an index to any searched fields (or checked in the database to make sure the examined fields are indexed)?
The Grails GORM does not automatically create indices for text fields unless you add the appropriate static mapping to your domain class.

What's the easiest way to sort an EF4 EntityCollection<T>?

I'd love to add some sorting to an EntityCollection that is bound to an ItemsControl (in xaml). I'd also like to do it as simply as possible. It appears that this is not possible.
If I wrap the collection in a "sorted" version of the collection property within the Entity I lose collection change notifications. I can't use a CollectionViewSource because the entity collection's BindingListCollectionView does not support sorting for some goddamned reason (note: I've seen the blog post with the "dirty" hack to get around this, so please don't answer with that kthx).
Is there a simple (couple lines of xaml, couple lines of code, whatever) way to achieve this??
The EntityCollection type cannot be directly filtered or sorted. It's a common LINQ-to-Entities problem, see:
Sort child objects while selecting the parent using LINQ-to-Entities
One solution would be to sort the entity collection separately using LINQ when you need the data, and incur the additional performance hit. If you're working with a collection you expect to be small and/or infrequently used, the difference in processing time could be negligible.
If you want the database perform the sorting and make use of any indexes, you can project the main entity along with the child entities. Alex James posts an example in his MSDN blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/alexj/archive/2009/02/25/tip-1-sorting-relationships-in-entity-framework.aspx. You're not limited to anonymous types, of course.

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