getting variables from other $page

[palacios000]

hello! I can't wait to see my first PW project wheeling on the net. Before that I need to solve some problems to understand the big picture.

let's say I am trying to organise a directory of hotels, several hotels share the same information (check-in, check-out, etc) depending from supplier. What I've done is have a template for "hotels" and one for "suppliers". In the "hotels" template I have a 'field' type 'page' (i named it: blng_supplier) where I can select which supplier to associate to the hotel.

then I wrote

$supplier = $page->blng_supplier; // here I'm on the hotel page
echo $supplier; // it outputs supplier page-id number: 1234

echo $pages->get($supplier)->supp_check_in; // nothing happens ...
echo $pages->get(1234)->supp_check_in; // it works!          

So I'm bit lost now.. what is the best way to get other variables from another page/template?

thanks in advace!

[kongondo]

Welcome to PW and the forums palacios000.

Your $supplier is in PHP terms an object. With that, you have all attributes of that object at your disposal; its id, name, title, parent, children, when it was created - everything . So all you need to do is, e.g. 

echo $supplier->title;
//or
echo $supplier->supp_check_in;//No need to do the $pages->get(1234) again.

Here I assume I assume blng_supplier is a single page field. If it is a multiple page field, you would have to loop through it..

[palacios000]

WOW! even easier then I thouhght.. well done PW and thank you for reply!

[LostKobrakai]

I'll just add why your code does not work, as you'd expected it: 

If you echo a variable in php it's first forced to be converted to a string type, because objects can't be echo'd. A page-object defaults to convert to the page id. In your $pages->get($something) call theres no conversion happening like before, that's why there's nothing found. The method $pages->get() either expectes a id in form of an integer or a selector in form of a string, the page object is neither of both.

echo $pages->get($supplier)->supp_check_in; // nothing happens, because there's an object provided
echo $pages->get(1234)->supp_check_in; // it works, because there's an integer provided 
echo $pages->get((int)$supplier)->supp_check_in; // works, too, because the object is first converted to an integer