How bizarre and how intriguing. What happens when there are hundreds of topics?

OK – I have never tried this but hey – let’s see if we can work something out.

Have you used sp_this_topic($id) to populate the data object? You would need to do that before starting the posts loop and would need to pass in the topic ID.

I did not think I needed to do sp_this_topic when I was within the following topic loop:

                            if (sp_has_topics()) : while (sp_loop_topics()) : sp_the_topic();

But if I do indeed need to do sp_this_topic – where do I get the topic ID from? I can’t find any reference in the API for that (and $id as you explicitly put it does not work as the following if statement returns false

if(sp_this_topic($id))

And yes this is a rather bizarre request (not one I would prefer but the end user wants to be able to view everything with out any extra clicks) but the number of posts will be controlled and very low so hopefully it will work.

Sorry about the incomplete Codex. We are populating it as fast as Brandon can write!

If you look at the three main views (not using iForum theme but say, default theme) then each one populates a data object. The first populates the groups and the forum rows. the second the selected forum and topic rows and the third the selected topic and post rows. So the forum data object ($spForumView) only has that forum record and related topic data (to fill the current page). That also generates the $spThisTopic data object which points to the current topic being displayed.

Calling sp_this_topic() will populate the $spTopicView data object and it’s collection – $spThisTopic. This has to be done before the loop is started. To pass the topic ID just use $spThisTopic->topic_id.

If you go to the forum admin > Toolbox > Data Inspector you can actually display all of these data objects to the screen when you display the relevant page which is very useful to see what data is in each collection object.

But I still don’t know for sure what will happen when you try this. I am actually both horrified and fascinated

Thanks – that gave me the missing pieces and I now have it working and it is fine with the limited numbers of posts that we will have.

Thanks for all the help!

good news!  its really just a lot like the wp loop… only more of them…

would love to see the site when you finish with it!