Displaying entries from two channels from same category on single-entry page

Question

I have a channel called "offices" with a limited number of entries. Every entry is assigned to a different category from a Category Group called "office-categories". For instance the first entry is assigned to a category called "office-1".
I have another channel called "files" with unlimited entries assigned to categories from the same Category Group "office-categories".
In time a lot of entries will be assigned to the same category "office-1".
I cannot use the Relationship in the first channel because there are so many entries in the second channel that make difficult to find the ones that belong to a specific category.
In the single-entry page of the first channel I like to have the details of the first channel entry and all the entries (all the files) from the second channel that belongs to the same category "office-1". Can someone tell me if this can be done in EE and how? Thanks a lot

Answer 1

It might be that I have misunderstood your question, if so please clarify and I will try and improve the answer.

EE is well suited to doing just what (I think) you are trying to do - through its template system you can construct pages that have highly specific and unusual combinations of entries drawn from multiple channels.

Here are two ways you could achieve this outcome - there are many more I am sure.

1) you can take advantage of EE's option to nominate multiple channels in a channel entries call. So specify your category, the two channels, and your results will be all the entries across both channels that have that category. You can sort the output by channel_short_name - so get your first channel entry out first (or last); you can also test each result to see which of the two channels it came from to adjust your layout / markup accordingly.

{exp:channel:entries channel="channel_1|channel_2" category="office-1" orderby="channel_short_name"}
{if count == "1"}
... do stuff on the first channel entry ...
{if:else}
... do stuff on the remaining entries
{/if}
{/exp:channel:entries}

2) simply call each channel separately within the same template - you can do this as often as you like within a template (there is an overhead in processing time for each call you make, so keep it down to a few if you can)

{exp:channel:entries channel="channel_1" category="office-1"}   
... do stuff on the first channel entry ...   
{/exp:channel:entries}

{exp:channel:entries channel="channel_2" category="office-1"}   
... do stuff on the remaining entries   
{/exp:channel:entries}

HTH