Introduction
Today’s challenge will test your knowledge of hierarchies. It will go beyond what is taught in [Guide] Simple Hierarchies, so this is a good time to brush up on your documentation search skills.
Objective and Requirements
The objective is to make two different hierarchies to test your skills in tagging, hierarchies, and NEQL expressions.
To complete the assignment, you will need this file:
HierarchyChallenge.bog (648 Bytes)
Instructions
Goal
The goal is to build two hierarchies.
1. Universe
Make a hierarchy where the top level is called “Universe” and the second level are The Simpsons, Disney, and Looney Toons with the characters in the third level, placed under the correct universe. Lastly, you should put each character’s characteristic under the character.
2. Character
The second hierarchy will have a top level called “Character”, the second level is each character, and the third is the universe that character belongs to.
Tools
You are allowed to use any standard N4 tools and tagDictionaries and are advised to try making your own tag dictionary too.
Submission
You should provide a .bog of your hierarchyService and a screenshot of your hierarchy
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I believe this is fairly true to the instructions except for the fact that in the second hierarchy I threw in a query level definition of characteristics to make the hierarchy work, but, although it gives the structure of Characters > Universe…it includes the characteristics, so it has a bit more than instructions asked for. Is there a way to do a ‘blank’ query to get rid of this? (it looks good until you go down another layer). After learning more, it was kind of trivial to get it to work.
This is the overall structure:
This is the first Hierarchy (Universe, universe, character, characteristic):
This is the second Hierarchy (Characters, character, universe):
Please give any input as it helps me to learn!!
HierarchyChallenge.bog (648 Bytes)
All hierarchies need a queryLevelDef, regardless of function. You can just type the word “true” in the query (no quotes). This will return every component in the system but the hierarchy will only put together what’s officially tagged.
I remember you saying that in one of the videos. I knew I had to put something in queryLevelDef to get it to work, but I forgot about the “true” to be transparent instead of sticking an actual tag in. Thank you. And it helped me greatly to drag the queries, etc. instead of what I was doing trying to type in the “Slot” values (i’m sure this isn’t the right terminology?), that you showed on your videos! It really does simplify and avoid all the errors I was making. Thanks for your response, I’ll go back and change this and submit a corrected version later.
If you got the hierarchy to work in the pictures shown, I don’t think there’d be a need to resubmit. There are many ways to make these work.
If @Rosenthaler permits, I can make a video in the next week or so to show the multiple ways to do this.
You really only need niagara tags for this entire thing. No need for any other tag dictionary if you’re creative enough!
I’m going to make a submission on this.
I won’t submit the bog but here is an easy solution only using Niagara Tags:
That’s a very elegant solution @Charles_Johnson 
love it!
@ControlFreak I’ll look into the bog soon, but judging from the screenshots it looks like you’re on to something right, but listen to Charles… He’s way ahead of me in hierarchies and his videos on the subject are amazing. If you wanna do a follow up video on the subject, I would love to watch it Charles.
I’m still considering continuing work in my menu, that fetches a hierarchy and builds from that.
Here’s another example of creating then with using Query Context to generate the folder hierarchy for you:
You can even use listLevel/namedGroupDef as well.
Again, there are multiple possibilities.
My point is as long as you can build a hierarchy you’re comfortable with, becoming with optimized ones will come with time. Just like coding. Learn to crawl, then walk, then run.
I will wait for your video! They are always awesome! Yeah, I created two “ad hoc” string tags and one “ad hoc” marker (they are under the label of t:univers, t:character, and t:characteristic, t for “toon town” i guess. I have made custome tag dictionaries at one time, but I thought I’d do the “ad hoc” for just these three. It’s just unbelievable how many different things you guys can do! I always call you guys the “Niagara 4 Whisperers”! cause just, damn! The stuff you guys do is just next level. I’ll look more into the above solutions! Thank you all for the input!
https://vimeo.com/1064156190?share=copy
This is the video for the solutions above.
These are more solutions. The point is that we can configure these all sorts of ways!
Using those UserID’s looks pretty trick! That’s gonna take a little brain stretching for me to understand, but it seems almost limitless what you can do (and maybe I can do someday!).
As to the video…It seems that Vimeo does not find me worthy? I only have a free version and it says I’m not authorized for accessing that file…I’ll try to find someone who has a paid version and try again.
Let me see where else I can put it.
All the videos on LinkedIn
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Thank you! And I do lurk around your comments, etc, there, so …I’ll check them out tomorrow. Cheers
love it!
