I have a content type that references multiple nodes, and I need a way to sort the display of those referenced nodes.
Any ideas?
--- EDIT ---
Clarification:
I'm not using views, but rather am using my own queries.
I have a bunch of teachers (teacher content-type), and some conferences (conference content-type).
Within the conference content-type I want a node-reference field set to handle multiple teacher selections. But I need to be able to manually order them independently. What that means is that each individual conference needs to be able to sort the order of the particular teachers selected.
That's the ideal situation, but not the way I'm actually doing it.
What I'm ACTUALLY doing to jury-rig this thing is to have separate node-reference fields (teacher 1, teacher 2, teacher 3 etc.). Each node-reference field independent of the others.
It makes for a mess when it comes to creating views or composing db queries.
I know what I'm looking for is all but impossible, but I thought I'd run it by the Drupal gurus here anyway...
--- EDIT 2 ---
Further clarification:
Another way to do what I want, but is really impractical, is to create a separate nodequeue for each conference. Then you could select a handful of teachers associated with each conference and order them via the nodequeue. - That should help with visualizing the problem. But as a solution, it's even more messy (in terms of administration) than the one I'm currently using.
Also: I should mention that we're talking about 40 to 80 conferences, and 100-200 teachers. Just to get an idea of why I'm looking for a more elegant solution than the two I mentioned above.
Node reference with autocomplete widget gives you reordering capabilities when number of values set to 'unlimited'. Maybe not the most comfortable, but works.
I'm assuming you're using Views since you mentioned "displays". You can always change the order of the view fields from the Views UI but the order will be static (all items will have the same order).
If you want each item to have a potentially different order for the fields maybe you can set up a parent child relationship where the child item is ordered dynamically.
Related
I’m absolutely stumped by what I suspect is probably simple for those experienced with Access. I’m brand new to Access (2010) and studying a lot, but unfortunately still confused by many basic concepts. I’m embarrassed to admit that I have spent about 40 hours trying (unsuccessfully) to solve the specific issue below. Please forgive me if I haven’t included enough detail here - I’m not sure how much someone needs to know to address this. I’m happy to edit and/or provide more information.
My question:
How do I create a Form for creating new records / editing existing records in Table1 where two fields in Table1 have different values from a single field in Table2? (I have better detail below)
I want the Form to have all the records from Table1. I have tried many different ways with queries, sub-forms, etc., but can’t pull it off. I’m fairly certain the issue is related to how I address Table2. Ideally, the user would be able to select from dropdowns in the form for the two fields to be updated in Table1.
I am including screenshots of a mockup of my intended Form concept, the object Relationships as I currently have them, the design and datasheet views of Table1 and the design and datasheet views of Table2.
“Table1” above is “t_PEOPLE” in the images while “Table2” is “t_COLORS.”
The object relationship types are currently one-to-many with enforced referential integrity (cascade update related fields) and the join properties are "include ALL records from 't_PEOPLE' and only those records from 't_COLORS' where the joined fields are equal."
I'm happy to send the actual database file if that helps.
I will be very grateful for any guidance - thank you!!
The general approach to this is as follows:
A) If I understand what you're trying to do here, your t_colors table is usually referred to as a Reference table or Lookup table. You need to make one form to add, edit, and delete records in this t_colors table. How the user accesses that form varies. I'll get to that in a minute.
B) The form for your People table needs to have drop down menus for your two color selections. In the dropdown menus' RowSource, you will use a query that looks up values in your t_colors table.
C) Depending what you are using your colors for in t_people, you should consider making a third table with PeopleID and ColorID in it. It would then link to both t_people and t_colors. This would allow you to have multiple colors specified for a single person, and you wouldn't be limited to two. In your People form, you would use a subform for these colors. The subform would probably need to be a datasheet form or a continuous form. If you are using a datasheet form for your people form, then you would need to use a datasheet form for the colors subform.
If the user wants to use a color that isn't already in your t_colors table, you need to give them a way of inserting that color. There are various approaches to this. You could use a union query in the dropdowns RowSource that shows a "" option. If selected you would bring up your Colors form and when they close the colors form you have to requery your dropdown menu. Or you could insert the color for them using VBA when they enter a value that is "Not In List" (an event that Combobox's have).
Please note that the relationships you've defined are not overly helpful or important in this case. Yes, they can be helpful when it comes to using the Update Cascade or Delete Cascade features. But quite truthfully, relationships are basically for programmers, to make sure you get an error if and when referential integrity is violated. Users should never see these errors and properly designed forms will prevent them from occurring. The main reason to use them is that it will force you to design your forms properly by giving you an error when something is wrong, hopefully during your own testing phase of the project.
I have about 20 different tables that each have a different parent / child relationship built into them. I've recently been asked to create a breadcrumb and Site Map for our website based off of all of these tables.
One idea I had, was to remove the parent / child relationship from each of these tables and create basically one table that holds the id and parentId and whenever I need to pull the parent child relationship I would just join the parent_child_relationships table to whatever table I was pulling from specifically.
Does this make sense?
Anyway, the problem with this idea is that i don't like it. haha.
Does anyone else have any other ideas of how this could be done? Or what the correct way of building a breadcrumb and sitemap based off of a site comprised of 20 tables or so?
If it helps, my site is comprised of asp.net, ColdFusion and uses a MSSQL database.
Thanks!
Do not let the implementation of the UI effect the design of your model and especially not your DB. Prototype the front end, involve your customer(s), give them a voice. Build your breadcrumbs and site map without it initially tied into your actual DB. Once your customer says "thats what we want, just like that", then freeze the prototype, then work on the actual implementation - how will your app request the data, what type of dataobject will you use AND THEN build your db,
"One idea I had, was to remove the parent / child relationship from each of these tables and create basically one table that holds the id and parentId"
This is not a very scalable solution, do not *reverse normalize your db. Follow standard relation database modeling/normalization techniques. Lots of small cohensive tables with lots of association tables.
I have a site where students can post their own content on it. Whenever they create content they are asked to type in their School Name. Since there will be multiple students from the same school I want to combine all of the duplicate values for the School Name field. I also want to link each School Name so it displays content from only the selected School. Is this possible? If so, how?
you really should consider using the school_name variable for a taxonomy vocabulary (http://drupal.org/node/23405), this way, the field wont be a duplicate, because it references the same term in the vocabulary.
then, when creating the content-type (or user) fields, use the 'relation to taxonomy' field option.
since it seems like you do not know all possible schools, use the tag widget.
in any case, you should think about deduplication, since this builtin method is not considering misspellings or different spellings of the same school name. (although the tag field has a autocomplete function).
a better approach is to present the user with all possible schools, however, that means you need to know all possible schools..
[EDIT] this, of course, is suggesting you are using drupal7 (or later). if not, use cck instead.
From the tags, it seems the situation is Drupal-6.
I think for you to get really good advice, we would need more information about the scope of the project and how many schools would be covered. If you are talking about a worldwide or US-wide scope, there are many schools with the same name, so you might need a school name / City combination (or something) to have a unique identifier for a school. I would suggest you have some way of selecting from a preset list, whether the project covers just a small school district, or there are thousands of schools, that way you won't have issues with duplicate "schools" created during the content creation process.
Since taxonomy terms are not fieldable entities in Drupal 6, you might want to consider creating a separate content type for schools (which would allow you to include location information, etc) and which would be represented as a node reference when students enter content that identifies a school. In Drupal 7, a vocabulary should work for the "school", since you can add fields, but there might be modules that you'd want to use which work better with nodes (a content type) than with fieldable entities (e.g. adding location data or other fields to a vocabulary).
I'm doing a project for a surveying company in Drupal 6. Ultimately, employees will need to enter measurements into a new content type. Currently they do it in a big Excel spreadsheet that has a bunch of macros to do calculations between cells (Meters to Feet, m^2, some pricing stuff).
My question is:
How would one go about replicating the functionality of this spreadsheet best in Drupal 6, keeping in mind the amount of data the employees using this system gather varies between projects (I.e., 3-floor house versus 1-floor with basement; etc.).
I have two ideas so far:
Create a new content type and populate it with CCK fields. Use Sheetnode's CCK functionality to drop Sheetnode CCK fields to replicate the spreadsheet exactly. Use Views to display this data other ways.
Create a new content type and populate it with CCK fields. Use Views (and possibly something like Views Calc) to get varying measurement values.
That said, I'm completely open to suggestions outside of these two implementations.
Thank you!
I dont have an answer so much as a caution. I did a project where a number of pieces of content were rendered simultaneously on a page, each piece being in its own node. The down side to multiple nodes is the performance hit you will take having at least one (possibly complex) query per node.
So in this case, if there were many many lines in the sheet, and each line was a node, you might take a pretty heavy performance knock.
This might be acceptable - but I thought I'd give you the heads up.
This might be one of those times where its best to actually create a purpose-built mechanism on-top of the Drupal API instead of using nodes+CCK.
Like I said, I could be being over cautious. It depends on your exact usecase.
HTH!
This seems like the kind of question http://drupal.stackexchange.com was made for...
I ended up doing this with jQuery, Measured Value Field and Flexinode; see: Auto-updating width/length/area using jQuery and Drupal6
I have standard basic article content type which, amongst other things, contains an image field which is configured to contain an unlimited amount of values.
I'm now trying to create a view that lists some of the fields in this content type but I want to limit the number of images that are returned for this specific field to 3 random images in the list (or less). Is this something that can be achieved right in my view configuration or do I need to do something ninja? I'm not aware of everything that's possible php wise to "rewrite" / "filter" the results of my view but I'm confortable with anything programming related.
I'm using drupal-7 with Views 7.x-3.0-alpha1
Thanks!
AFAIK there is no way through the Views UI to randomize the selections of a grouped field.
I can see two possible ways, in theory to achieve what you want.
Use hook_views_query_alter to alter the SQL query for the view. I'm not sure Views support what you need to randomize the results, but you have the ability to alter the query that views generates, and might be able to randomize it.
Select all results, but using theming to only show the randomly selected options. This could be done in a preprocess function. Views provides several, depending on your display option, hook_views_view_unformatted might be what you need.