Forum Discussion

nickyates's avatar
nickyates
Mentor
12 years ago

sorting forum posts by the number of messages in each post

I am trying to make a custom component which displays the 3 forum posts with the most comments.  I am having trouble displaying the posts in decending numerical order of the number of comments each post has.  is there a way to do this using either the API or Freemarker?  Please could you provide an short example?  Thanks

5 Replies

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  • YuriK's avatar
    YuriK
    Khoros Expert
    12 years ago

    Hey nickyates,

     

    Here is a sample component I wrote to print out the id's of threads in descending order by the message count in the thread.

     

    <#assign thread_list=rest("/boards/id/Moderation/threads").threads.thread/>
<ul>
<#list thread_list?sort_by(['messages','count'])?reverse as thread>
<li>${thread.id}</li>
</#list>
</ul>

     You should be able to get the topic message from each thread using thread.messages.topic.

     

    I hope this helps,

     

    Yuri

  • nickyates's avatar
    nickyates
    Mentor
    12 years ago

    Hi Yuri,

     

    Now ive added some more activity to my board ive noticed that the ordering isnt quite right.  My top 5 boards are ordered by the number of messages as shown descibed in your code above however it is ordered as described below

     

    5

    3

    11

    1

    1

     

    I believe this is because the sort_by is assuming that the content of the count field is text.  In a previous thread (https://lithosphere.lithium.com/t5/developers-discussion/sorting-forum-posts-by-the-number-of-messages-in-each-post/m-p/83626#M2959) i added in the ?number command however when i do the same here it throws an error.

     

    Thanks 

     

    Nick

  • AdamN's avatar
    AdamN
    Khoros Oracle
    12 years ago

    Here's an alternate approach that may work for what you're trying to do:

    http://lithosphere.lithium.com/t5/developers-discussion/How-to-filter-topics-based-on-highest-replies-across-community/m-p/82542/highlight/true#M2900

     

    One downside is that you'd have to make a separate REST API call per message to get the number of replies, ie.

    /messages/id/1234/replies/count

    You can use the href attribute to make it easier, though. For example:

    <#assign messages=rest("/search/messages?q=is_root:true&sort_by=-replies").messages />
<ul>
<#list messages.message as message>
	<#assign count = rest(message.@href + "/replies/count").value />
	<li>${message.id} - ${count}</li>
</#list>
</ul>

     I hope this helps!

  • YuriK's avatar
    YuriK
    Khoros Expert
    12 years ago

    The problem is that sort_by is not able to convert strings to numbers. And our DOM has all the items as strings. You can either do two pass-throughs like what we did in here, or you can try Adam's suggestion which I think is more elegant but requires 2 calls.

    Hope this helps,

    Yuri

  • vishwajeet_hol's avatar
    vishwajeet_hol
    Expert
    10 years ago

    Hi,

     

    I am trying to sort posts by no. of views. How to do that .

     

    Just tried below code, based on YuriK solution, but it doesn't works :

     

    <#assign thread_list=rest("/boards/id/<board_ID>/threads").threads.thread/>
<ul>
<#list thread_list?sort_by(['messages','views','count'])?reverse as thread>
<li>${thread.id}</li>
</#list>
</ul>

    Thank you.

     

    Regards,

    Vishwajeet.