Feature Proposal: It would be usefull if you have a fixed list location for a topic

Motivation

One of our customers creates lists with the TOPICLIST Var. The list is always in alphabetical order. They need contextual sort order. (adding a LISTPLACE or something ??)

Description and Documentation

New var for contextual sorting of topics (or webs) , not only alphabetical.

Examples

Impact

WhatDoesItAffect:

%WHATDOESITAFFECT%

edit

Implementation

-- Contributors: AlexTrapp - 15 Aug 2011

Discussion

I'm curious as to how this is different to VarSEARCH's order parameter?

You could make DataForm, attached to the "contextually-sorted" topics, which contains the 'LISTPLACE' value, and sort on that.

If this doesn't meet your needs, then please help me understand your proposal a little better

Or did you want to explicitly enumerate the order the topics should be displayed? Still, you can do that VarSEARCH's topic param, or pass the sequence to VarFORMAT which will do (almost) the same thing

-- PaulHarvey - 16 Aug 2011

"contextual sort order" - what is the context, what data?

-- ArthurClemens - 16 Aug 2011

as a 'sort of' side issue. VarTOPICLIST will probably be replaced by and alias to a SEARCH (ie, it will continue to work, but its worth learning SEARCH more) as TOPICLIST has issues - the biggest of which is that it doesn't respect permissions, so leaks potentially sensitive information (sadly, this is 'by design' - from 10 years ago)

The main reason its not been replaced yet/previously, is that SEARCH was much slower, due specifically to its needing to check each topic for permissions, but foswiki 2.0 already has had work done to ameliorate that (and more to come i hope).

-- SvenDowideit - 16 Aug 2011

Thank you Paul, you´re absolutely right. Classical case of 'not to see the woods for the trees'. So I think this case is closed. Thanks a lot.

-- AlexTrapp - 25 Aug 2011

We don't really have any examples of this anywhere, so it's hard to know what's possible. The fact that the topic param allows you to specify an order for SEARCH to process things is also undocumented (I think).

-- PaulHarvey - 25 Aug 2011