Thread

Hi all,

Pretty simple question here I just can’t seem to find an answer to in the archives.

Is it possible to check whether a Global Template Variable exists? Rather than just check that it’s equal or not equal to something…

Scenario: I’m writing out some tracking and Google analytics JavaScript within a website, site-wide, so I put the text in global template variables. So I have {analytics} in every template page writing my analytics JS.
Thing is we might want to turn this off sometimes. And I don’t want to delete the contents of the global variables (which would admittedly do the job) as I might want to turn it on again later.

So my idea was to just rename the global variable and thus stop it being written. (e.g. “analytics_off”). But to do this I would need to check if the variable exists before trying to write it. Something like:

{if analytics}
{analytics}
{/if}

...which obviously isn’t working.

Or maybe this is just a really silly way to be going about things and someone can suggest an alternative?

Why not just have a template that contains all the Google JS and have it embed in a ‘Footer template’

{embed="global/analytics"}

If you want to turn analytics off just comment out or delete the code in the analytics template?

Not sure if I am understanding your question though.

Oh. I had considered just making a template page and including that but forgotten about the possibility later on. That actually works. If I alter the name of “analytics” it doesn’t cause any issues, just ignores the embed.

Thanks!

Is it possible to check whether a Global Template Variable exists? Rather than just check that it’s equal or not equal to something…

Well, couldn’t you check for it being empty?

{if foobar != ""}
 {foobar}
{/if}

I tried this originally but it doesn’t appear to work. If foobar doesn’t exist (i.e. I’ve changed its name to “foobar_off”) this if statement will output {foobar} for me, and since foobar no longer exists I get the actual text “{foobar}”.