Thread

In order to avoid nesting weblogs, at the top (or near the top) of a template, I want to grab the data from a few custom fields of a weblog and then use the variables as necessary throughout a page.

e.g.

{exp:weblog:entries weblog="{article}" limit="1"}
        {assign_variable:art_pic_1="{article_pic_1}"}
{/exp:weblog:entries}

article_pic_1 is the name of a custom field in the article weblog.

This approach doesn’t work.

Help please.

Thanks!

ryestew, have you verified that {article_pic_1} contains the correct value by itself, and have you also tried:

{assign_variable:art_pic_1 = article_pic_1}

Oh I’ll give that one a shot.  I got it to work by having a few tags like this on the page

{exp:weblog:entries weblog="{article}" limit="1"}
        {article_body}"}
{/exp:weblog:entries}

and

{exp:weblog:entries weblog="{article}" limit="1"}
        {article_pic_1}
{/exp:weblog:entries}

Is it bad form to have multiple exp:weblog:entries tag on the same page to the same weblog?

ryestew,

assign_variable is the first thing run in your template as per its parse order so you are never going to be able to assign a variable inside a weblog:entries tag this way.

Using multiple weblog:entries tags are ok. It just means you are going to have extra queries per page. You can make use of the disable= parameter to limit this query usage though

Here’s my latest failure… I tried the assignment without the quotation marks per Brandon’s suggestion but that didn’t work.  So I tried with quotation marks surrounding curly brackets like below:

{exp:weblog:entries weblog="{article}"  limit="1" url_title="{segment_3}"}
        {article_pic_1}
        {assign_variable:art_pic_1="{article_pic_1}"}
        {art_pic_1}
{/exp:weblog:entries}


{art_pic_1}

and…
inside the exp:weblog:entries tag - it {art_pic_1} prints outs the data but outside the exp:weblog:entries tag - it does not work.  So this would seem to be a scope issue.  Any suggestions?

Hi ryestew,

As John stated in his post above, this will not work. You will have a different way of structuring your template. You might also consider Reeposition.

Cheers

Greg

So HOW DO YOU CREATE custom variables in Expression Engine Tag language?  It seems like a pretty miserable language that doesn’t allow you to create your own variables.

Here’s my latest failure… I tried the assignment without the quotation marks per Brandon’s suggestion but that didn’t work.  So I tried with quotation marks surrounding curly brackets like below:

{exp:weblog:entries weblog="{article}"  limit="1" url_title="{segment_3}"}
        {article_pic_1}
        {assign_variable:art_pic_1="{article_pic_1}"}
        {art_pic_1}
{/exp:weblog:entries}


{art_pic_1}

and…
inside the exp:weblog:entries tag - it {art_pic_1} prints outs the data but outside the exp:weblog:entries tag - it does not work.  So this would seem to be a scope issue.  Any suggestions?

So HOW DO YOU CREATE custom variables in Expression Engine Tag language?

EE supports preload replacements, but they can’t be changed at runtime. Think of them as constants, if you will. Of course you can always use “real” PHP variables, too.

I found that the only way to do it was with php variables.  “Preload replacement” variables were too limited.  But php variables did the trick ( and it was a relief to be able to get access to them and to use them too ).

Couple of things…

{exp:weblog:entries weblog="{article}"  limit="1" url_title="{segment_3}"}

Setting the url_title to segment_3 would be redundant as the channel entries tag is being left in dynamic mode and will already see the url title.

If you want to force-feed a url title parameter like that you also need to dynamic=“no” as a parameter.

Also if you find you need to get content from the same channel entry multiple times in a template (and there are no other channel:entries tags needed in between) you can run the entries tag as the first and last piece of code in the template and nest all other embeds/html in them. I commonly do this on single-entry templates to avoid multiple channel:entries tags calling the same entry >1 time.

Thanks for the assist, Mike.

ryestew/Peter - any additional questions on this thread?

That’s what I have concluded.

I found that the only way to do it was with php variables.  “Preload replacement” variables were too limited.  But php variables did the trick ( and it was a relief to be able to get access to them and to use them too ).

Sounds good.. closing this thread.. if anyone has any additional questions, feel free to start a new thread based on this one.