Calling functions in other classes

[lastdance]

I've been reading S2 documentation like crazy, and I'm pretty sure the answer is 'no' but I'm going to throw out the question anyway:

Is there any possible way to call functions from a different view than the one you're currently on? For example, the EntryPage class has a function print_comments. But what if I want to print the subjects of the 5 latest comments on the Recent view (maybe in the sidebar)? The RecentPage class doesn't include that function, so I'm assuming there's no way to call it unless the core was rewritten to add it into RecentPage and allow it to take parameters so it knows which comments to pull back. Am I correct in that assumption?

I'll gladly take the question elsewhere if this isn't the right place. Any direction would be so much appreciated.

Comments

[adalger]

This is the right place to ask. :)

You're pretty much correct here. You'd have to do some fancy coding in the RecentPage class to have it retrieve comment subjects for each entry on the page. The EntryPage class is only concerned with a single entry, so it's pretty clear what comments it's looking for, but the RecentPage class isn't built to display any comments, so it's not designed to even care about them beyond how many there are.

It's an interesting idea. Do you mean the 5 most recent comments per entry, or the 5 most recent comments on any entry on the page? The latter would be a little trickier, because you'd have to find probably the five most recent comments on each entry, then sort for which of all those are the five absolute most recent.

Flimsy Suggestion

[zorkfox]

Perhaps you can access the comments using the Entries[] member of the RecentPage class, on the theory that each element of that array will have data about the comments on that entry. I tried to write some code for you, but my brain hasn't been in code-mode for a long time and I was stymied.

Look through the Entries[] array of your current instance of the RecentPage class and get the titles of the comments from the Comments[] array in those entries until you have five of them. Build in a flow control statement to stop after five (so you don't search every entry needlessly) and also one to handle an instance of no comments (this covers instances where there are no entries yet, or a page full of entries that don't have any comments).

When I glanced at the language reference for S2, I didn't see a simple way to do this because there isn't an until loop or even a while. You have to make up some kind of bastardized foreach. :( Maybe you can write an if statement that calls return when it finds it has collected five comments.

You might be able to use this function from Haven as a template. It's not the greatest example of code, but I hope it'll get your brain working in the right direction:

function RecentPage::lay_sidebar_view_summary() : string
{
    var string return;
    foreach var Entry e ($.entries) {
        var string subject = $e.subject != "" ? $e.subject : $*text_nosubject;
        $return = $return + "→";
        if ($e.security) { $return = $return + " $e.security_icon"; }
        $return = $e.poster.username != $.journal.username ?
                  $return + """ $e.poster:<br /><a href="#entry_$e.itemid">$subject</a><br />""" : 
                  $return + """ <a href="#entry_$e.itemid">$subject</a><br />""";
    }
}

[afuna]

No, afraid it's not possible. The problem is that the individual comment data isn't available, unless you are on the entry page. (Completely separate in the backend, so that even if the S2 language syntax were to allow it, there wouldn't be any data to print out).