Using recursion to find a parent? Suggestions orther than recursion?

[John W.]

Working on a project where I have different categories of Departments, under departments I have Offices, and each office has multiple pages.

DEPARTMENTS

     HUMAN RESOURCES

          About Human Resources
          Job Listings
               job 1 details page
               job 2 details page

     ADMINISTRATION

         About Administration
         Meet the Administrator

-----------------------------

stored in HUMAN RESOURCES is a background image and title of the department.

Instead of creating a background image for each office page (and it's sub pages like job 1 details page), I'm using the background image stored in HUMAN RESOURCES for all the child pages.

I'm familiar with using $page->rootParent, however, this will return DEPARTMENTS rather than the office, e.g. HUMAN RESOURCES that each sub page belongs to.

I thought about using a recursive function to traverse from the current page, when it reaches the template "office". Basically, if I'm in job 1 details page, it would traverse back up the tree until it reaches "office" template, such as "HUMAN RESOURCES".

Has anyone done something similar, but, using a built in method that I'm missing?

Thanks.

 

 

 

 

[ottogal]

Suggestions:

You could identify the HUMAN RESOURCES page as the first child of the root page:

$page->rootParent->children()->first()

Or: Add the background image to the rootPage and refer to it from the Office pages.

[John W.]

Yeah, tried that, it pulls the first child under DEPARTMENTS

This doesn't work when you have several departments such as

DEPARTMENTS

     HUMAN RESOURCES

            About HR

            Job Listings

                      Job 1

                      Job 2

     ADMINISTRATION

            About Administration

    EMERGENCY OPERATIONS

            About Emergency Operations

 

In the case above, your suggestion would always return "Human Resources"

[John W.]

I think I found a quick solution:

# cycles through all the current $page parents then
# returns the parent that is #x in the list
# $page is the current page, $parentNumber is the 
# parent to find and return in the tree

function getParent($page, $parentNumber) {
   $cnt=0;

   foreach($page->parents() as $p) {
    $cnt++;
     if($cnt == $parentNumber) {
          return $p;
      }
     }
     return false;
}

 #pass the current $page and return its third parent

 $parentPage = getParent($page,3);
 echo $parentPage->title;

 

[adrian]

Couldn't you use this, assuming all offices, eg HUMAN RESOURCES have a template names "office"

$page->parents('template=office');

Actually you might want "parent" instead of "parents" to make it easier in this case.

[dotnetic]

Use Adrian's solution

[bernhard]

$page->closest() might be the slightly better option (or might not): https://processwire.com/api/ref/page/closest/