Thread

I have a category group assigned to a channel. The categories are structured like this:

Author
- Author1
- Author2
....

Publisher
- Publisher1
- Publisher 2
...

With Author and Publisher being the main categories.

The list of authors and publishers are both very long and are added to constantly. I’m currently using GWCode Categories to generate a list of each for population into a dropdown menu, but it’s really memory intensive, increasing the load time from just over 1 second to just over 3 seconds.

I think a query might be a good alternative to try, but I’m really bad at MySQL and the like. Any help?

Hi Tony,

I might be able to come up with something, but since you’re using a third-party add-on to accomplish this at the moment, something tells me your dropdown is more than just a simple list of existing categories. Could you tell me exactly how the data needs to be structured in this dropdown? Perhaps if you provide your existing template code, it’ll help shed some light on it for me.

Thanks!

It actually is just a list that I’m outputting to create a dropdown. The reason I’m using it is because it allows me to display all the subcategories of a specific category. My categories are set up like so:

Authors (cat ID of 1)
- Author1
- Author2
....

Publishers (cat ID of 2)
- Publisher1
- Publisher2
...

So in one dropdown I’m outputting only:

- Author1
- Author2
....
- AuthorN

and the second dropdown I’m outputting:

- Publisher1
- Publisher2
...
- PublisherN

There are 1,000 categories in total here, split between Authors and Publishers.

Oh ok, well this is actually simpler than I thought then. Is there a reason the native Channel Categories tag won’t work here?

That’s strange, I’m not sure why I ended up using GW Code. I just tried using the categories tag like so:

<form>
    <select>
     <option value="">Select author…</option>
      {exp:channel:categories show="not 2"}
      <option value="{site_url}books/author/{category_url_title}">{category_name}</option>
      {/exp:channel:categories}   
    </select>
     
   </form>

And it works, except that it also includes “Authors” at the top of the list, which I don’t want. Is there any way I can remove that one? Perhaps this is why I used GWCode.

The other issue right now is this: without any of this code listing all these categories, my benchmarks look like:

BENCHMARKS
Loading Time: Base Classes   0.0850
Controller Execution Time ( Ee / Index )  1.9638
Total Execution Time   2.0491

And afterward, like this:

BENCHMARKS
Loading Time: Base Classes   0.0645
Controller Execution Time ( Ee / Index )  3.0686
Total Execution Time   3.1333

Sometimes a total execution time of 5 seconds. Now this is obviously because there are 1,000 categories in there. Am I better off loading a manually generated, flat file with the list of categories and then manually updating it as categories are added?

😉  Glad the easy way works.  You should be able to ‘hide’ author by using a conditional:

{exp:channel:categories show="not 2"}
{if category_id != 1}

      <option value="{site_url}books/author/{category_url_title}">{category_name}</option>
{/if}
      {/exp:channel:categories}

That said… I agree- I’m not loving the extra time this takes.  If it was rarely updated?  I’d probably hard code it in a template and embed it.  Depending on how critical it is?  I might even write an extension and generate a static file.

On flip side- if those options don’t appeal (don’t want to take time for the extension and it’s updated too often to make manual a decent option), I’d consider this a good option for Tag Caching.

And because it would be quick and easy- may as well see if you get much improvement from using the query module.  Basically:

{exp:query sql="select * from exp_categories where parent_id = 1 order by cat_name"}
      <option value="{site_url}books/author/{cat_url_title}">{cat_name}</option>
      {/exp:query}

Note- I had to tweak some of the variable names to match the fields in the db.  I suspect this will cut down a little on the resources.  Combine with tag caching and see if you hit a dynamic result you’re pleased with.

Thanks, I’ll have to try it this weekend. I’ll let you know how it goes. Thanks for all the help so far.

Let us know how it works out, Tony!

Hi Guys.

I went ahead and used the query that you wrote and this improves performance dramatically. I also added tag caching so that should help a bit too. Thanks for all the help!

😉  Thanks for the confirmation- and glad that helped.  If you run into anything else, just let us know!