Pager doesn't preserve filtering criteria

My issue is with showing a paged result-set of Blog Posts, but I'm certain this exists in other section-controls (News, Content Items, etc.).

I've set up a page for showing historical Blog Posts, allowing the actor to filter by a specific date or a specific taxonomy item (category).  Using the URL-key-prefix of 'k' the URLs are generated in the format:

Hi Anthony,

The reason for all this happening is that all URLs generated by the widgets go through route handlers. When using route handlers, anything in the URL between two slashes is part of the route. When you want multiple filter criteria, you are essentially generating a specific route. Say if you want to filter by date AND page you could generate one of two routes:

• path-to-your-page/.../<date>
• path-to-your-page/.../<page-number>

Hi Slavo -- I appreciate your thorough explanation of how the routing-engine can become confused by the filtering criteria, but I do have a couple of follow-up comments:

1. Why does the Pager control ignore the UrlEvalationMode property of its host control and always append the page-index as a query-string parameter?  If I specify the mode to UrlPath, then I'd expect that the page number would be part of the URL and not the query-string, ie:

Hello Anthony,

1. By default, on a new page, the page number is appended to the route (see attached image). You've probably modified the settings to make it go in QueryString mode?
2. That's a good suggestion, but would complicate URL handling a lot. The reason it has been implemented for Taxonomies (not just Categories and Tags, which are the default taxonomies), is that you can have custom taxonomies with custom names in the URL. Instead of "/-in-Category/" you could create your own taxonomy called Sports, and the Url "/-in-Sports/" would still work out of the box. 
   
   To see how complicated it can get, let's take the example of filtering by date. With the current implementation, you can filter by day, month or year (without a custom /-for-Date/ pattern). If we want to introduce a pattern, we can have URLs like "/-for-Date/2011/02/22", "/-for-Date/2011/02", "/-for-Date/2011". Those all have a different number of routes. How would the routing engine know how many of those routes represent the filter? What if you have "/-for-Date/2011/02/-in-Category/Widgets"? Then we could easily misinterpret "-in-Category" as the value for the day. Parsing all combinations like the above becomes non-trivial. This doesn't scale, and it also defeats the purpose of having UrlPath mode in the first place - pretty URLs. This is why for advanced (non-default) scenarios, we advise using QueryString mode.

Is there any way to change that route "-in-Category" to something more simple? Maybe "category"?

Hello Conrad Ehinger,

Currently, the only way to change that URL string is to implement your own URL evaluator and implement your custom views, which use it. The reason we have an "-in-" is that these URLs are valid for all taxonomies, and not only categories and tags. 

Categories and tags are just instances of the Hierarchical and Flat taxonomies, but in Sitefinity users can create their own. The URLs are implemented to work with all of them, not just the built-in ones.

Sorry to bring up an old thread, but is it possible to filter upon multiple categories or a parent category (and pull down all children category related content) when things are hierarchical?

Thanks!
Andy

Hello,

If I understood you correct, you want to have the ability to filter categories (in the Categories Grid section, in the backend of Sitefinity). At the moment you could only sort categories in the grid view of Categories by Title, URL and est.

All the best,
Stefani Tacheva
the Telerik team