1st Product in Section displayed at Section Level

[I-CC]

Hi,

I know that out of the box, Actinic cannot display ‘at the section level’ the price assigned to the 1st product within itself (i.e. first or more products within the section that the link would connect the visitor into), but am wondering whether using the perl/php abilities that are available now within Actinic, if this could be possible.

Also should point out, that displaying compact versions of all products within the page to achieve this and then linking onto the extended (full version) of the product within the same windows in all it’s glory is known about, but would rather stick to a single page per product instead of lots of products per page and also, wish to maintain the sitemap listing of each product within it’s own section – so hence this theory stage.

I am thrashing around with ideas as opposed to knowing how to achieve this in all honesty, so my question is theoretical at this point, unless someone knows how to achieve this now, so.

"Given the perl/php abilities, in theory could it be possible to program up say a section link layout with perl/php code that delves into itself (own section) and locate the first product item (bycount) and inserts the price into this custom layout at site generation/upload time?"

If this is possible, then the potential for this could be expanded I would guess, by having an if statements or something along the lines of only 1 product in the section, then show Price: xx.xx, or if more than 1 product in the section, then show Price from: xx.xx (being the lowest price), or further still, if 1 or more products with choices that change the price then show Price from: xx.xx (being the lowest again) and so on.

This is all theory at this stage, and am really asking those that have played with the perl/php abilities in the local running of the application, whether this might be feasible...

Answers on the back of cigarette packets accepted

[cdicken]

Hi there

Looks like this met with a resounding silence....

The only thing I can suggest is putting a product duplicate on the same section level as the subsection. You can then hide all details about the product except the price - or maybe even use JavaScript to parameterise the product price and product reference - and then include those JavaScript parameters within the sub-section layout.

These are all ideas off the top of my head (I don't smoke ) but I hope they are useful.

[NormanRouxel]

You could try doing this in a two pass process.

1) Use PHP to write a file containing the section ID and the price of the 1st product. You'd put this code into the product layout and it could set a flag to indicate that it had written the 1st price and thus skip the rest.

2) Some more PHP inside the Section Link layout looks for the appopriate list entry and displays it if found. It won't find anything the 1st time you do a preview or update but the file will be available every time after that.