Using Stash to Filter by Category

Question

I am trying to use stash to kill multiple queries to the same channel in multiple places in the site/page. This is my stash embed file called 'featured.html':

        {exp:channel:entries channel="homepage_featured_items" dynamic="no" show_expired_entries="yes" orderby="date" category='40|41|42|162' disable="member_data|category_fields|pagination"}
      {exp:stash:append_list name='featured_list'}
        {stash:this_category}{categories}{category_id}{/categories}{/stash:this_category}
        {stash:article}
          <article class="col_4 col left">
              <header>
                <h4><a href="{featured_item_link}">{featured_short_text}</a></h4>
              </header>  
              <div class='article-content'> 
                <p><a href="{featured_item_link}">{featured_short_description}</a></p>
              </div>            
              {exp:ce_img:pair src="{featured_image_home}" width="220" height="150" crop="yes|center,top|0,0"}
                <img src="{made}" alt="{title}" width="{width}" height="{height}" />
              {/exp:ce_img:pair}    
          </article>
         {/stash:article}
      {/exp:stash:append_list}
    {/exp:channel:entries}

And I would like to bring different categories in like so:

<div id="featured_home">
    {exp:stash:embed:featured}
    {!-- 40,41,42,162 --}
    {exp:stash:get_list name="featured_list"  match="#^.*40.*$#" against="this_category" limit="1"}
      {article}
    {/exp:stash:get_list}
  </div>  

But for some reason I am getting nothing. I put output='yes' on my stash embed append_list tag and I got all of the information I am looking for (albeit more articles than I wanted), but I can't call the context or the category. Ideally I would like to call these all over the page(s) of the site:

{exp:stash:get_list name="featured_list" match="#^.40.$#" against="this_category" limit="1"} {exp:stash:get_list name="featured_list" match="#^.41.$#" against="this_category" limit="1"} {exp:stash:get_list name="featured_list" match="#^.42.$#" against="this_category" limit="1"} {exp:stash:get_list name="featured_list" match="#^.162.$#" against="this_category" limit="1"}

Also, am I saving anything but multiple calls in this instance? Should I be looking for a context in this case?

Answer 1

OK, finally figured it out with much tweaking and changing elements. Since the output='yes' tag spit out the correct information for all articles, it was a matter of realising the embed was being triggered and not the get_list tag. The parse order was not allowing the stash:append_list tag to fire before the stash:get_list tag. I simply put process='start' to subvert the parse order and it works perfectly.

{exp:stash:embed:featured process='start'}
    {!-- 40,41,42,162 --}
    {exp:stash:get_list name='featured_list' match="#^.*40.*$#" against="this_category" limit="1"}
      {article}
    {/exp:stash:get_list}
    {exp:stash:get_list name='featured_list' match="#^.*41.*$#" against="this_category" limit="1"}
      {article}
    {/exp:stash:get_list}
    {exp:stash:get_list name='featured_list' match="#^.*42.*$#" against="this_category" limit="1"}
      {article}
    {/exp:stash:get_list}
    {exp:stash:get_list name='featured_list' match="#^.*162.*$#" against="this_category" limit="1"}
      {article}
    {/exp:stash:get_list}

On the other note, the queries on the page went down by eight overall queries, which tells me that this is worth the effort in stashing this away. On a big site with a lot of traffic that's 8 less queries per page call that ever hit the database.