(Advanced) Building dynamic blocks based on the page being viewed

For more advanced sites built with Pages, you may want to change the output of a custom HTML or PHP block depending on which page the user is viewing. For example, if you have a custom menu, you may want to highlight the active item.

We can implement this in Pages by checking the underlying page URL parameters. Although you access a page with a friendly URL (FURL) like http://<yourcommunity>/section/page, behind the scenes this is mapped to a raw URL, such as http://<yourcommunity>/index.php?app=cms&module=pages&controller=page&path=/section/page. Notice the path parameter allows us to identify which page we're accessing. When we access the \IPS\Request::i() object, we can compare against this parameter, like so:

{{if strpos( \IPS\Request::i()->path, 'section/page' ) !== FALSE}}
	<!-- We know the user is on /section/page -->
{{elseif strpos( \IPS\Request::i()->path, 'othersection/otherpage' ) !== FALSE}}
	<!-- We know the user is on /othersection/otherpage -->
{{endif}}

Note that for reliability, we're using PHP's strpos function to check for the presence of the page URL in the path parameter, rather than a simple comparison.

Example

Let's assume we've created a Manual HTML block, we're adding HTML to show a menu, and we want to highlight the correct item based on the page. Here's what our block contents might look like:

<ul class='ipsList_inline cMyMenu'>
  <li {{if strpos( \IPS\Request::i()->path, 'help/home' ) !== FALSE}}class='active'{{endif}}>
    <a href='/help/home'>Home</a>
  </li>
  <li {{if strpos( \IPS\Request::i()->path, 'help/faq' ) !== FALSE}}class='active'{{endif}}>
    <a href='/help/faq'>FAQ</a>
  </li>
  <li {{if strpos( \IPS\Request::i()->path, 'help/tutorials' ) !== FALSE}}class='active'{{endif}}>
    <a href='/help/tutorials'>Tutorials</a>
  </li>
</ul>
  

If we had many items to show, it would get tedious to list them all like this. We could instead do it as a loop:

// Using a PHP variable to store an array of pages => page names that we'll loop over
{{$myPages = array('help/home' => "Home", 'help/faq' => "FAQ", 'help/tutorials' => "Tutorials", 'help/qna/listing' => "Questions", 'help/qna/recent' => "Recent Questions", 'help/contact' => "Contact Us");}}

<ul class='ipsList_inline cMyMenu'>
	{{foreach $myPages as $url => $title}}
  		<li {{if strpos( \IPS\Request::i()->path, $url ) !== FALSE}}class='active'{{endif}}>
			<a href='{$url}'>{$title}</a>
	  	</li>
  	{{endforeach}}
</ul>

Now to add new items to our custom menu, we just have to add them to the array.