Contao List Bundle

This bundle offers a generic list module to use with arbitrary contao entities containing standard list handling like pagination, sorting, and filtering.

It makes it possible to generate lists not only for events, news or faq's but with every DCA you like.

Features

• generic list module to use with arbitrary contao entities
• support all form of standard list handling like pagination, sorting, filtering
• works together with filter bundle
• inheritable list configurations
• template are build in twig
• support for Encore Bundle

Usage

Install

1. Install via composer (composer require heimrichhannot/contao-list-bundle) or contao manager
2. Update your database

Recommendations:

• use this bundle together with Reader Bundle.
• use Encore Bundle for managing your frontend assets

Usage

HINT: You can do the following steps for a basic list setup also in an interactive command. Simply run vendor/bin/contao-console huh-list:make in your contao root.

1. Setup a filter (see Filter Bundle setup)
2. Create a list config (System -> List config)
   • To add list elements like images, videos, slider etc, add list config elements (see Concepts -> List config elements for explanation)
   • Recommendation: for better performance, check "Limit formatted fields" in your list configuration and select only the fields you really need to have formatted
3. Create a list frontend module and output it, where you like it

Concepts

Inheritable list configuration

Since list configuration can be lots of data sometimes we decided to outsource it into a dedicated DCA entity. These entities can be assigned to one or even multiple list modules in a reusable way.

In addition it's possible to create list configs that inherit from other list configs. Hence overriding a single option while keeping everything else is possible.

The Item class

Every database record output in a list (e.g. an event) is modelled and wrapped by the Item class. The concrete class is DefaultItem. You can imagine the item as a kind of ORM (object-relational-mapping).

The most important properties of an item are the arrays raw and formatted which also can be iterated in the list item template:

• raw: contains the raw database values
• formatted: contains the formatted representation of the raw values

Example: Let's say a database record has a field startDate which holds a unix timestamp of the date chosen in the backend. Then raw contains this unix timestamp and formatted contains the pretty printed date according to the dateFormat set in the contao settings, i.e. "2020-09-12".

The list bundle uses the method FormUtil::prepareSpecialValueForOutput() in heimrichhannot/contao-utils-bundle for handling special values. It supports a wide range of types of special values:

• date/time fields
• arrays
• fields with options, options_callback and entries in the DCA's reference key
• binary fields (files, images, ...)
• ...

You can access both of these arrays in your list item twig template as you normally would in twig:

{% for field, value in raw %}
{% endfor %}

{% for field, value in formatted %}
{% endfor %}

CAUTION: By default all values of a database record are formatted and accessible in the item template. As you can imagine if some of the fields have thousands of options, the process of formatting can take some time and can reduce the peformance of your website. Hence you always should limit the formatted fields and only format these you really need. You can adjust that in the list configuration (field limitFormattedFields).

For convenience reasons you can also access the field values like so in your twig template:

{{ fieldname }}

If you configured the field fieldname to be formatted, it will contain the formatted value. If not, the raw one. If it's formatted, you can still access its raw value by using:

{{ raw.fieldname }}

List config elements

Every list config can have one or more list config elements. These are designed to specify things that can occur multiple times (e.g. because there are many fields of one type).

Currently available list config element types:

Image

You can add images either as formatted value of, if you also like to have additional features like image size processing or automatic placeholders if no image is set, you can use the image list config element.

After the configuration you can output it as follows in your item template:

{% if images|default and images.myImage|default %}
    {{ include('@HeimrichHannotContaoUtils/image.html.twig', images.myImage) }}
{% endif %}

IMPORTANT: Note that by default the generated picture elements are added to an array called images. If your DCA contains a field with the same name, you need to specify a different container name like e.g. resizedImages (using overrideTemplateContainerVariable).

Documentation

Developer documentation