sorting forum posts by the number of messages in each post

Hey nickyates,

You can use the id from each board to make another rest api call. In the example below, all I did is call the following API on each board:

http://lithosphere.lithium.com/t5/rest-api/bd-p/developers-rest-api?leaf-id=Board.messages.count#Board.messages.count

<#assign boards = rest("categories/id/5678")>
<table class="lia-list-wide">
<thead id="columns">
<tr>
<th scope="col" >Title</th>
<th scope="col" ">Comments</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>

<#list boards.category.boards.board as c>
<tr>
<td colspan="1" rowspan="1">
<h3><a id="link_13" id="link_13">${c.title}</a></h3>
<div>${c.description}</div>
</td>
<td rowspan="1" colspan="1">
${rest("/boards/id/${c.id}/messages/count").value}
</td>
</tr>
</#list>
</tbody>
</table>

Most Objects returned in the rest calls have either an ID and/or an href that you can then use to make api calls on that Object. 

Hope this helps,

Yuri

Hi Yuri,

Thanks for your response,

My problem is that i want to order these by the number of messages on each board.  As i understand it you need to order at the level of the list by adding ?sort_by

<#list boards.category.boards.board as c>

however at this point i do not know the number of messages in each board so i am not able to order them.  

Thanks

Nick

I believe what Yuri is suggesting is to do this in two passes:

• first rest call to get the boards
• for each board, second api call to get the count of threads
• store the count and ID in a local sequence,
• sort it descending by count (might have to investigate the right object to use to do this, i'm a novice with freemarker)
• loop through that and display the board info

i haven't written the code for this but i *think* this should work. i can try it later today unless you beat me to it ;)

Hey nickyates,

I created some code to create a list of the indexes of the boards in a list along with their count. You can then get the different pieces of information you need from each board to display. I just displayed the board title along with index and count. It's not the most efficient algorithm, but I can't think of anything better at this point with just using freemarker templates.

<#assign boards = rest("categories/id/Management/boards").boards/>

<#assign order_list = []/>
<#list boards.board as c>
   <#assign one_index_obj = {"count":rest("/boards/id/${c.id}/messages/count").value, "spot":c_index}/>
   <#assign order_list = order_list + [one_index_obj]/>
</#list>

<#list order_list?sort_by("count")?reverse as list_item>
   ${list_item.count}:${list_item.spot}
   ${boards.board[list_item.spot].title}
</#list>

Hope this helps,

Yuri