CityDesk gotchas

You may have noticed the snazzy new archive index, complete with a nice article list. Creating an archive is slightly (but only slightly) clumsy in CityDesk. The CityDesk Knowledge Base has an article describing how to use the "extra" fields to create the illusion of nested folders for the purposes of displaying "breadcrumb" links. However, making the small step to creating a nested archive doesn't quite work. You might think that having your master index have code like this:

• {
$ foreach index in (and (folder "articles\notdablog\archive\*") (filename "index")) sortDescendBy .filedDate $ }
• {$ index.headline $} {$ index.extra2 $}{$ next $}

then setting the "extra2" field of each sub-index page to this might work

• {
$ foreach article in (and (thisFolder) (not (filename "index"))) sortDescendBy .filedDate $ }
• {$ article.headline $} {$ next $}

No such luck.

Variables like "thisFolder" are evaluated in the context of the article they are published from, not the context of the article where they appear. So your master index page will just have sub-indices that include all the articles in the same folder as your master index. Well That Doesn't Help!

The fix is to explicitly put the path to each sub-index in the extra2 field, rather than use "thisFolder". So try this:

• {
$ foreach article in (and (folder "articles\archive\200306") (not (filename "index"))) sortDescendBy .filedDate $ }
• {$ article.headline $} {$ next $}