Member Categories Check and "Stashing" the Results for Later

Question

I’ve got a page where I’m posting links to the groups that a user has access to based on Member Categories. Before, I just used the {exp:member_categories:categories} loop and it worked fine, but there was no organization to the way the list was displayed and it was just a long random list of links. So I’m trying something different and running a separate {exp:member_categories:check} for each of the categories, broken down into logical groups. Not the most efficient, I know, but it’s only on one page (and I can technically cache it when it’s done).

Anyway, the only problem is that I can’t give a single “you do not belong to any groups” if they don’t belong to any groups. If I do a {if no_results}, then I get that for each category that it checks. And I don’t really want that.

I was going to try to use Stash to set some sort of value to an append_list, then check that at the end. However, it’s not working. I have tried both of the following, setting a value of “1” so that I could check for “is_empty” later.

{exp:stash:append_list name="group_list" process="end"}
    {exp:member_categories:check category_id="113"}
        <p><a href="/members/groups/sample-group">Sample Group</a></p>
        {stash:item_link}1{/stash:item_link}
    {/exp:member_categories:check}
{/exp:stash:append_list}

and

{exp:member_categories:check category_id="113"}
    {exp:stash:append_list name="group_list" process="end"}
        <p><a href="/members/groups/sample-group">Sample Group</a></p>
        {stash:item_link}1{/stash:item_link}
    {/exp:stash:append_list}    
{/exp:member_categories:check}

I’m not sure if this is even possible? Or are there any other options?

Answer 1

Don't know much about member categories add-on, but seems you could do something like your first idea.

{!-- #1 Stash categories for member --}
{exp:member_categories:categories}
    {exp:stash:append_list 
        name="mcats" 
        context="{category_group}"
        parse_tags="yes"
    }
        {stash:cat_id}{category_id}{/stash:cat_id}
        {stash:cat_name}{category_name}{/stash:cat_name}
        {!--etc...--}
    {/exp:stash:append_list}
{/exp:member_categories:categories}

{!-- #2 Check if some cats exist for this member --}
{if {exp:stash:not_empty name="mcats"}}

    {!-- #3 Output Category ID 113 --}
    {exp:stash:get_list 
        name="mcats" 
        context="113"
        prefix="st"
    }
        {if st:no_results}<p>No Results for Category ID 113</p>{/if}
        <li>{st:test}</li>
    {/exp:stash:get_list}

{if:else}
    <p>No Results at all for this member</p>
{/if}

Untested. (You might need to wrap #1 or #2, both separately, or the whole thing with stash:parse if you don't get expected parsing results).