Thread

I have a channel that has entries that can have 0-10 categories assigned to an individual entry. I need to conditionally display one link or another based on whether a specific category is among the selected categories. Basically in pseduo code this would be:

{if category == "magic-category"}
DISPLAY THIS LINK
{if:else}
DISPLAY THIS OTHER LINK
{/if}

The problem is, this doesn’t seem to work with the way you access categories in a EE entry. Since I can only access categories through the {category} entry pair that means it will loop through my conditional for every category that is selected for the entry. I only want that link to show up once. But if the entry had 3 categories selected, 3 links would show up. And if the entry had 0 categories, 0 links would show up.

So how can I accomplish what I am wanting to do?

Hello RedSeal,

Thank you for posting your question here on the ExpressionEngine forums.

I believe what you are trying to work with is the Category URL title.

To test, please see what output you get with this.

{categories}{category}{category_url_title}{/categories}

If it is category_url_title that you are looking for, please try this inside of your channel entries tag.

{categories}{if category_url_title == "magic-category"}conditional stuff{/if}{/categories}

Please test this and let me know if it helps.

Cheers!

Hi Shane-
Thanks for the response. No, I was actually saying that the categories tag won’t work because it acts as a loop. So if I put your code along with mine maybe it will be more clear.

{categories}
{if category_url_title == "magic-category"}
DISPLAY THIS LINK
{if:else}
DISPLAY THIS OTHER LINK
{/if}
{/categories}

I only want either “DISPLAY THIS LINK” or “DISPLAY THIS OTHER LINK” to be displayed a grand total of exactly once. So if I use the categories tag and no categories are selected for an entry neither of the contents would be displayed at all. Conversely, if I had 3 categories selected for an entry 3 sets of the conditional contents would be displayed. I basically need it to be something like:

{if ANY CATEGORIES FOR THE ENTRY == "magic-category"}
DISPLAY THIS LINK
{if:else}
DISPLAY THIS OTHER LINK
{/if}

But I don’t know how to accomplish this.

Hi RedSeal,

That’s pretty complicated and I am not sure you could do that with the categories loop.

You might be able to use the Query Module and build a custom bit of SQL to grab what you need.

I can also move this over to development and programming, they may have some ideas as well.

Cheers!