Clearing out my old files earlier and I came across some old keywords I used on numerous occasions. Instead of  just detailing one, I’m actually going to join a few together here to make a example anyone using eSellerpro could use with a little thought.

Lets Make a Real-Life Example

Lets assume that you have two customfields the first with ‘Other Colours’ and another with ‘Sizes’, both in the custom fields group called ‘Variations’. These are two very common fields for anyone who deals with variation products, they could of course be ‘Languages’ for say DVD’s or ‘Years’ for of applicable models and so on…

So lets get right in and cover the first keyword, which is lets get value of the first field out so we can use it:

{{CustomFields:Variations:Other Colours}}

This keyword is in the format of ‘CustomFields:GroupName:FieldName‘. CustomFields calls the Custom Fields, GroupName is vitally important because it was found that the keyword only pulls in the values of the customfields from previous customfield calls, so if the value we were looking for was in a different group, then it would not be resolved; And finally the FieldName which is the internal name of the custom field (as opposed tot he display name which can be different).

So using the keyword ‘{{CustomFields:Variations:Other Colours}}‘ we can pull out the values in the ‘Other Colours’, for the sake of this example these other colours are ‘blue,green,red’. Noticing they are separated by commas, this is extremely important, as we’ll be using the ‘comma’ to spilt them up shortly.

Wait!! Lets Error Check

Now before we go any further, we need to error check ourselves. What do I mean by this? I do not think its a good idea to show or process any further code if there are not any ‘other colours’ to be showing to the viewer, we do this using another keyword.

There is two variations of this new keyword, IF and IFNOT. Both of these allow to check to see if a condition is true (there is another for IF/ELSE and IFNOT/ELSE but thats not required for this example, plus you could just alternate the IF/IFNOT to capture the alternative if its a 1:1 check, anyway back on topic…). These keywords are in the format of:

{{IF/Value being Checked/Value to Check Against/Output if True}}
{{IFNOT/Value being Checked/Value to Check Against/Output if True}}

Looks scary right? Naa its easy, lets do a real example. Lets pretend we have an colour blue in our custom field ‘Other Colours’ and IF we find blue, lets bring in an image that is the colour blue (for the smart ones, you can see where we could go with this):

{{IF/[[CustomFields:Variations:Other Colours]]/Blue/ <img src=”some-blue-image.png” />}}

Now you’ll notice the use of [[  & ]]  and not {{ & }}, this is for a very good reason, image the custom field value contained ‘Blue/Red/Green’, this would break the earlier format of {{IF/Value being Checked/Value to Check Against/Output if True}} and a good practice is to always use the ‘square’ brackets and also do your best to avoid forward slashes ‘/’ in you data.

So if the value of the ‘Other Colours’ was ‘Blue’ then we would have had an blue image appear and if there was not, ‘nothing’ would have been output from this statement.

That brings us very nicely onto ‘nothing’, going back to previously mentioning its not a good idea to show or process code when there is no need, we need to check to make sure the ‘Other Colours’ actually has something in it, so we can continue, we do this by using this keyword set up:

{{IFNOT/[[CustomFields:Variations:Other Colours]]// do something }}

This says in plain English: IF the value of Other Colours is NOT blank (thats what the // is ) then do something.

End of Part 1

This feels a good place to stop, I’ll cover off the next stage of this little session in my next post. I hope I have at least got your creative juices flowing, I know what I’m thinking, perhaps we could have a set of colour images and those images being linked, so that customers could pick their alternative colours or sizes using a user friendly block to your eBay listings or may be a ‘year picker’. Hey the options are endless!

View part 2 here:  Using the Split Keyword to Break up Your Data