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Page field: select from a large number of pages


HerTha
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Fellows, I need your advise:

I am going to use a page field to select (one or more) related products. Everything's nice with just a few products to select from. With a large number of products (say 5000) I am running into trouble, though.

When using a PageListSelectMultiple input field the user needs to browse through all ~100 columns of pages to find the desired entry.

When using an AsmSelect input field it is possible to type in the beginning of the desired entry, so it's fairly quick to navigate to the right entry. However, every page (in admin) with such AsmSelect loads with quite some delay because all 5000 page field references have to be collected first. It actually prevents a fluent workflow.

So, I wonder what's best practice to select from a page field with many entries, provided you know the name (or at least part of it) of the desired entry?

I don't want to spread the product pages into subfolders at the moment because this would affect a lot of other functions of the site as well.

I could imagine some text field where you can type in the beginning of the entry name. When hitting return a (reduced) page tree comes up with matching results. And if entering the complete entry name, the page would be added to the list of selected pages instantly, without displaying the page tree first. Does some method like this exist already? Other suggestions, anybody?

tia!

HerTha

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The only thing remotely like your wish is the InputfieldPageAutocomplete. It's in the core but by default it's not enabled. It's like the PageListSelectMultiple, but instead of a pagetree you've only a autocomplete textfield to add pages to the field.

Edit: You can take a look at it here: http://modules.processwire.com/modules/inputfield-page-autocomplete/

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Wow, so many options - amazing!

I knew it would be somewhere, just hiding from me :-)

I'll go with InputfieldPageAutocomplete for now as I have to select a few out of many.

Just installed and works like a charme -

Thanks guys!

HerTha

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  • 4 months later...

I'm struggling with this too.

I am going to use a page field to select (one or more) related products. Everything's nice with just a few products to select from. With a large number of products (say 5000) I am running into trouble, though.

In my case I need to choose from a huge set of tags. There are about 10,000 of them and I've set them up as simple pages. They are not in any kind of taxonomy (I lost that argument). I've been trying all the methods I'm aware of.

The best in terms of performance and ergonomics is to divide the tags up into folders A to Z and use PageListSelectMultiple but each of those folders is presented as a paginated list. With several hundred items per folder its a very tedious click, click, click experience to tag a page with half a dozen tags.

I tried AsmSelect and ChosenSelectMultiple with all the tags in one folder but both get overwhelmed and fail. The edit page never loads.

A field using SelectMultipleTransfer can be paired up with another field to select one of the A-Z folders as its source. With its dual lists I was hoping options which had been selected would persist when the source folder is changed but it doesn't work that way. If you change the folder feeding the SelectMultipleTransfer it clears the previously made selections.

Any idea how I can accumulate selections from different folders?

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The problem is that most of those fieldtypes do load all the options ahead of time, which can easily time out with this number of pages. FieldtypeAutocomplete loads pages via AJAX not before the first two letters are entered into the inputfield, so this could be an option if the editors know their tags at least partly.

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Had a similar issue recently and tried a few of the Auto complete solutions for some client projects. It's worth mentioning that auto-complete only works effectively when editors know in advance the name of the page they need. This isn't always the case. What I'd love to see is a hybrid of the two. Ie a page select field where you can browse a tree AND search too. :)

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I really like: http://modules.processwire.com/modules/inputfield-select-multiple-transfer/

It is kinda like an ASM, but with a built in live filter bar - works pretty nicely, although the search bar could do with some css tweaks to make it a little larger.

Ohh that's nice. Hadn't seen this module before and it has a search too!

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I like SelectMultipleTransfer too but it's one of those which loads the entire list so that's not good for huge numbers of choices.

Looks like it's down to these two:

PageListSelectMultiple - cumbersome but lets user look through all the choices

PageAutocomplete - quicker but requires some familiarity with available choices

I'm going with PageAutocomplete. If a user gets stumped staring at the empty field they can go view the choices elsewhere as ordinary pages.

Eventually I'd like to figure out how to put a different Javascript front end on some of the existing inputfields.

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