Randomize order in backend (actual order, not presented order)

[joe_g]

Hi there,

I'm trying to achieve randomizing a large set of pages that needs pagination. It could happen every night or so.

I know sort=random doesn't work with pagination so I thought, if I can randomize the position of the pages in the actual backend this could work. This might be a heavy operation, but I also wouldn't know how to do it so it's effective. There is the https://github.com/kixe/PageMove PageMove. plugin that could to this with the method sortChildren(). This plugin doesn't seem to be present in the store. But, in the forums there is mentions of this function being built in to v 3.0, but I can't find the docs for that.

Would you know the best way to go about this?

thanks!

J

[bernhard]

Could you pleas tell us why you want to do that to get a better understanding of the context? Also, what do you mean by "a large set of pages"?

[joe_g]

I have ~800 things (in this case published texts) that needs to be shown in random order. It's about 20-50 pages or results, depending how many I show per page.

Preferably the randomization stays the same, so a refresh (or a page change) doesn't ruin the order.

 

 

[Jan Romero]

If you’re running MySql 8 you can use the row_number window function:

update pages p
    inner join (select id, row_number() over (partition by parent_id order by rand()) - 1 as randomsort
                from pages
                where parent_id = :YOUR_PARENT_ID) as r on r.id = p.id
set p.sort = r.randomsort

There may be faster ways to give consecutive sort numbers to random children, but this runs in the blink of an eye (Adminer says 0.005s for my 986 pages). Repeat until you get the order you like.

Make sure you set the parent to “manual drag-and-drop” or you won’t see any effect.

[joe_g]

@Jan Romero Wow, interesting. Thanks, will try this!