How to show the number of listings in subcategories?

[Lhotch +]

Originally Posted by jonathan.melnick

Also, I would expect this feature to be part of the core. Each and every client for which I have had to implement classifieds has requested this feature. If they want it, anything is worth it. I really don't see myself telling them: "Well, it's possible, but it makes my job a lot harder, so if you don't mind, we'll skip that one, ok?"

My stance has nothing to do with the difficulty in performing the task. It has to do with practicality. In IT the customer IS NOT always right. They hired you because you were the expert, which to me means that you should not only be able to accomplish what they ask BUT you should also be able to explain to them the ramifications of doing what they ask. This isnt about avoiding a time consuming task, its about doing the right thing, educating the client and not just taking their money for something they ask for because they ask for it.

As for it being built into the core, some people have hundreds of categories, I know a few with a couple thousand. This means to get a count of the number of ads in a cat, every category would need to be queried. Why add hundreds of additional database queries to a page load? Is displaying the number of ads in a category that important? Whats the benefit?

If a category has no ads and your worried about people clicking on it and not seeing anything then perhaps they should spend more time on site marketing so there are ads on their site to look at.

Originally Posted by jonathan.melnick

Finally, can you think of any other simple solution ?

The simplest solution would be to edit the getSubCategoriesList function and add an additional query for each cat to get a count of records and then display it with the category name.

[Eric Barnes]

I am just picking up on this thread but from reading it if this is a must I would go with a module and then hook into the cron job to update a new category table field for the number of listings. This is ran once daily and unless you are getting hundreds of new ads a day I don't think it would really hurt to show a number that may be less. I for one have never visited a site that showed a number and then went and actually counted to make sure it was right.

When the script generates the number of listings it creates a LOT of over head. The way it is setup it starts with the parent and then loops through all the children to get the total number in the parent and all children. So with lots of categories it can force your site to a crawl.

[michael +]

Larry, Eric, thanks for the insight. Content to let this go.