How to find entries with no category

Question

I have a field categories in a channel news, and I want to find all the entries in news that don't have a category set. I know I could loop over the entries and find them that way, but I'm hoping to do it with a query. I tried

{% set uncategorized = craft.entries.section('news').categories(':empty:') %}

But it returned none.

score 11 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 01 '14 at 11:37

11

You can do this in a single query using the search parameter:

{% set uncategorized = craft.entries.section('news').search('-categories:*') %}

More on searching here.

answered Jul 01 '14 at 11:37

Ben Croker

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Cool, nice answer. – Stuart Whitehead Jul 01 '14 at 14:36
This is returning all of my entries, including the one with a category in news.categories – Marion Newlevant Jul 01 '14 at 19:06
strange, it works for me. are you on v2.1 and is your field handle "categories"? – Ben Croker Jul 01 '14 at 20:49
very latest 2.1.2561 and field handle categories. The category group is newsCategory – Marion Newlevant Jul 02 '14 at 03:16
can you rebuild the search indexes (on the settings page) and then try again? – Ben Croker Jul 02 '14 at 11:36
That fixed it! And also the parallel problem I was having with untagged entries. Thank you so much! – Marion Newlevant Jul 03 '14 at 05:30
great, i've reported a bug to P&T which should address this issue in future – Ben Croker Jul 03 '14 at 09:06
fixed in this update http://buildwithcraft.com/updates#build2563 – Ben Croker Jul 08 '14 at 16:19

score 4 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 30 '14 at 11:14

If you're wanting to avoid a loop, I think the best solution here would be to find the entries which do have a category set and work backwards using the |without() filter. I can't see this being possible in only one query.

{# First, get your categories #}
{% set categories = craft.categories.group('optionalGroup').ids() %}

{# Find all news entries which have a category set #}
{% set newsWithCategories = craft.entries.section('news').relatedTo({targetElement: categories}).ids() %}

{# Now find news without categories #}
{% set newsWithoutCategories = craft.entries.section('news').ids()|without(newsWithCategories) %}

{# Finally retrieve the EntryModels #}
{% set newsEntries = craft.entries.section('news').id(newsWithoutCategories).find() %}

As you can see, there are quite a few calls to the DB being made here. This little algorithm would probably be more efficient with a loop.

{% set newsEntries = [] %}
{% for news in craft.entries.section('news').find() %}
    {% if news.categories is empty %}
        {% set newsEntries = newsEntries|merge([news]) %}
    {% endif %}
{% endfor %}

That loop is looking better and better. – Marion Newlevant Jun 30 '14 at 17:25 — Marion Newlevant, Jun 30 '14 at 17:25

How to find entries with no category

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