Thread

I am sure the answer is simple, but why is the following code not working?

{exp:weblog:categories category_group="2" disable="category_fields" parent_only="yes" style="linear" weblog="services"}
     <li><a href="http://{path=inform/services}%22class=%22current" title="{category_name} services" class="current">{category_name}</a></li>
{/exp:weblog:categories}

I simply want to append a class=“current” to the link, based on the category in a menu being the currently viewed category.

The url looks like: /inform/services/c4/ for example.

Just as a note, I don’t know why the original post’s code doesn’t work, but I was able to get the desired results by simply reorganizing the code to:

{exp:weblog:categories category_group="2" disable="category_fields" parent_only="yes" style="linear" weblog="services"}
     {if segment_3 == "C{category_id}"}
          <li><a href="http://{path=inform/services}%22class=%22current" title="{category_name} services" class="current">{category_name}</a></li>
     {if:else}
          <li><a href="http://{path=inform/services}" title="{category_name} services">{category_name}</a></li>
     {/if}
{/exp:weblog:categories}

Hm- glad you got it working.  And I replicate the oddness.  Didn’t see anything wrong w/your original code.  Simplified it down to:

{exp:weblog:categories disable="category_fields" parent_only="yes" style="linear" weblog="reading"}
     <li>{if segment_3 == "C{category_id}"} stuff" {/if} {category_name} - {category_id}</a></li>
{/exp:weblog:categories}

Still didn’t work- though just adding the else in there did:

{exp:weblog:categories disable="category_fields" parent_only="yes" style="linear" weblog="reading"}
     <li>{if segment_3 == "C{category_id}"} stuff {if:else} not stuff {/if} {category_name} - {category_id}</a></li>
{/exp:weblog:categories}

I’ll give the crew a ‘heads up’ on pure oddness factor.  Otherwise- are we good to go ahead and close this one out?

Yes, I am all set.  Thanks for your reply Robin, it was a curious and odd thing indeed.

The point is this: When you are using “simple conditionals” (ie without “elseif/else”), at the point that this is being processed, the {category_id} has not yet been parsed. So the parser is literally seeing this:

{if "C4" == "C{category_id}"

Using advanced conditionals, which are parsed later, is one way to fix this. Another would be to flip them around:

{if "C{category_id}" == segment_3}

A third option would be to use category URL titles, which wouldn’t have to be quoted and braced. Making sense?

Yes, once the advanced conditionals worked, I imagined it must be a parsing order problem - but I originally didn’t realize that “simple conditionals” and “advanced conditions” had different parsing orders ... though I now see that it is stated clearly in the documentation here.

NOTE: Advanced Conditionals are evaluated after all EE tags are parsed. See the ExpressionEngine Knowledge Base for example usage.

Thanks for the detailed explanation - hopefully this thread will help someone in the future.

Yes, the two types of conditionals are parsed at a different stage, as explained in this article. I am going to mark this thread as resolved for now, if anything else comes up, kindly start a new thread, thanks.