Using a seed when getting random pages

[neonwired]

$items = $pages->find("template=city, sort=random, limit=20");

I'm using find to get 20 random items, is there a way to use a seed so i can paginate them?

[Macrura]

you should be able to paginate any PageArray

https://processwire.com/api/modules/markup-pager-nav/

[neonwired]

But it's still sorted randomly. So unless you can use a seed the order will change on every page.

[Robin S]

2 hours ago, neonwired said:

But it's still sorted randomly. So unless you can use a seed the order will change on every page.

You are right - interesting that this has not come up in the forums before (to my knowledge).

Thinking of ways of working around this, I think you'll need to find all your city pages without applying any limit so the random sort is only done once. Then you can "fake" the pagination, getting a slice() of the city pages on each results page. This technique for using array_chunk might also be handy:

See this post for how you can use MarkupPagerNav outside of its typical use:

If you have a large number of city pages you might not want to load them all into memory. So a couple of approaches you could look into:

1. $pages->findMany()

2. $pages->findIDs() to return an array of IDs, then use PHP's array_slice together with $pages->getById() to load each page of results.

[DaveP]

I just wonder if there could be usability issues here? I don't know the background, obviously, but displaying a random selection and then making them look 'non-random', isn't that risking misleading (maybe that's too strong a word) users that they are seeing everything when they aren't?

[neonwired]

On 5/16/2017 at 4:33 AM, DaveP said:

I just wonder if there could be usability issues here? I don't know the background, obviously, but displaying a random selection and then making them look 'non-random', isn't that risking misleading (maybe that's too strong a word) users that they are seeing everything when they aren't?

You're not really making them look non-random, it's just so you can paginate a random set of results, without a seed it would just pick a whole new set of random results on every page and potentially pick the same ones again which is definitively a usability issue.

What i'm doing is creating a page that uses ajax to load more items when scrolling downwards, i can't bootstrap all as there are thousands of items so without using a seed the best suggestion is Robin's to load IDs.

In wordpress you can pass the seed when you order by random, would be nice if processwire had something similar

[Macrura]

I thought we already had seeds...

http://cheatsheet.processwire.com/pagearray-wirearray/getting-items/findrandomtimed-n/

http://processwire.com/api/ref/wire-array/find-random-timed/

though not sure if this will work for your use scenario...

[Robin S]

11 hours ago, Macrura said:

I thought we already had seeds...

http://cheatsheet.processwire.com/pagearray-wirearray/getting-items/findrandomtimed-n/

http://processwire.com/api/ref/wire-array/find-random-timed/

though not sure if this will work for your use scenario...

Cool, I haven't looked at that method before. But it only works with a PageArray/WireArray so not ideal if you have thousands of pages to sort. Would be good if there was something similar for PageFinder.

[Robin S]

I think the pagination behaviour with $pages->find("sort=random") is unexpected and so have opened a GitHub issue.

Looking at the PageFinder source code it isn't difficult to see how a seed could be used with the random sort, but the relevant method isn't hookable so any fix will require a core change.

[benoitb]

Hello @neonwired

I'm looking for a solution to this problem (pagination + random sorting on an infinite scroll).
Did you find a workaround ?