Can you point me to the PHP code you were looking at? That would be a huge help.

Thanks,
Stephen

Ok, thanks for the code. Now let's narrow down exactly what you want to do.

So, is the user viewing a category or a product at this point?
- if they are viewing a product, then we can assume that there is a product in that category, and the code above will work fine (inserts the current category into the filter module).
- if they are viewing a category, then they may be viewing an empty one, in which case you want the filter to show a child category, which I assume will contain some products, right?

If you don't have too many categories, it might work best to do this the brute-force way: simply have a series of tests to see if the current category is "X" (one of the empty upper-level categories) and if detected, then set the category to "Y" which is one of its children that you know to have products.

e.g. let's say category 5 has no direct products, but it has a subcategory 23 which does.
Same for category 7, has subcat 27 with some products.


$vm = JomGenius("virtuemart");
$cat = $vm->info("category_id");
$changeto = null;
if ($cat == 5 ) $changeto = 23;
if ($cat == 7 ) $changeto = 27;
// ... add more as required...
// if it wasn't on one of the empty ones, set it to the current category
if ($changeto == null) $changeto = $cat;
// then insert it into the module
$changes->mod(109)->setParam("virtuemart_category_id",$changeto);
// and display the module.
return 109;

Ok, so tell me, how might you be able to distinguish when you are on an empty category? And how far down the category tree are you going to need to go in order to find the category that you want to display?

e.g. are all 1st-level and 2nd-level categories empty, and 3rd-level categories have products in them? Or is it different in every case? Somehow you're/we're going to need to code this, and any patterns in the data like this will help.

Thanks,
Stephen

That makes sense, thanks.

Next questions (sorry so many questions):

If your "top" level has 3 categories (cat 1, 2, 3)
... and each of those has 3 categories (1a, 1b, 1c, 2a, 2b, 2c, 3a, 3b, 3c)
... and each of those 9 categories has some products in it,

then if a user is viewing the very top level, or category 1, 2 or 3, then which category's products should the module show?

e.g. if the user is viewing category 1, should the module show products from 1a, 1b or 1c?

And can the module that you are talking about display products from more than 1 category? What's the name of the module, so I can check it out?