Let's say I'm creating some app documentation. In creating a content type for functions, I have a text field for name, a box for a general description, and a couple other basic things. Now I need something for storing arguments to the function. Ideally, I'd like to input these as key-value pairs, or just two related fields, which can then be repeated as many times as needed for the given function. But I can't find any way to accomplish this.
The closest I've gotten is an abandonded field multigroup module that says to wait for CCK3, which hasn't even produced an alpha yet as far as I can tell and whose project page makes no obvious mention of this multi-group functionality. I also checked the CCK issue queue and don't think I saw it in there, either.
Is there a current viable way of doing this I'm not seeing? Viable includes "you're thinking of this the wrong way and do X instead." I've considered using a "Long text and summary" field, but that smells hackish and I don't know if I'd be setting myself up for side-effects. I'm new to Drupal.
There is the http://drupal.org/project/field_collection module but it's not yet ready. Right now you would need to implement your entity alas to do this :( not easy.
Not sure how well it would work, because it currently does a bit more (eg, forces to group pairs into categories and the keys need to be predefined) but you might want to have a look at http://drupal.org/project/properties.
You could create a these key-value fields on their own: create 2 regular fields that that can be added as often as needed.
So you have a x fields for the keys and x for the values. If this is only for you or other people it might work OK but usability wise, it's very ugly.
If you need to extract the fields from the function, to display it properly in a page template, you should propably use a different approach. Write the function with its arguemnts in a CCK field and in the template extract them as needed. The arguments are always (depending on language) in () and the different arguments are seperated by , so splitting them would by pretty easy.
Related
Can anyone actually explain, in layman's terms, what is a real-world use case for the set operation's options?
While I fully understand what set with merge does, as well as merge beeing a boolean and mergeFields being an array of fieldPaths, I cannot think of cases in which mergeFields might be of any use.
I also understand the fact that mergeFields basically acts like a mask for the object passed to the set operation, but I still cannot think of how is it so useful that it actually got implemented within the SDK.
Can someone shed some light?
After looking through the documentation, there seem to be two reasons why you might want to use one vs the other:
mergeFieldPaths/mergeFields trigger an error when passing in field values that don't currently exist on the document while merge will add in those fields if they don't exist. The error is good for safety purposes if you're concerned about typos/writing to incorrect field paths.
This one is just a guess, but the documentation indicates mergeFieldPaths/mergeFields ignores AND leaves fields untouched while merge ONLY leaves other fields untouched. It's possible there's some performance advantage to using mergeFieldPaths/mergeFields esp for documents with a ton of fields. The difference might be direct access vs still needing to look at unspecified fields to identify the matches in some way.
SetOptions Reference
Is there a way to add one CCK field which consists of two separate fields, e.g. Author(s), having first name and last name on separate fields?
Thanks for any help!
Show answer: not easily.
Long answer: yes, but with a bit of php trickery.
Look at this doc here, specifically, the lower "join" part will get you on the right track, but its specifically for 5.x. If you are working on 7.x this would be quite a bit different.
You can use CCK 3.x for Drupal 6, which contains a sub-module called Multigroup, which allows you to take groups of fields (first name, last name for example), and repeat those groupings. However, before using this version of the module, note that it does not have an officially supported release, and its future is a bit uncertain.
In addition to other suggestions, you could try Flexifield, or just have two different fields.
To make two fields end up looking like one...
display them together later on using inline fields or by altering the template
use Actions to join the two values together and save them to a different field, or
use Computed Field to write them to another field on node save
Content Multigroup in CCK3 currently has no upgrade path to Drupal 7 and its interface is a bit clunky if you aren't planning on having a multi-value, multipart field.
Background: I have a complex search form that stores the query and it's hash in a cache. Once the cache is set, I redirect to something like /searchresults/e6c86fadc7e4b7a2d068932efc9cc358 where that big long string on the end is the md5 hash of my query. I need to make a new argument for views to know what the hash is good for.
The reason for all this hastle is because my original search form is way to complex and has way to many arguments to consider putting them all into the path and expecting to do the filtering with the normal views arguments.
Now for my question. I have been reading views 2 documentation but not figuring out how to accomplish this custom argument. It doesn't seem to me like this should be as hard as it seems to me like it must be. Leaving aside any knowledge of the veiws api, it would seem that all I need is a callback function that will take the argument from the path as it's only argument and return a list of node id's to filter to.
Can anyone point me to a solution or give me some example code?
Thanks for your help! You guys are great.
PS. I am pretty sure that my design is the best I can come up with, lets don't get off my question and into cross checking my design logic if we can help it.
It's not as easy as you would like to make it.
In views, arguments are used to return objects, fx user, node, term, custom object. So you could make some custom code, to get the "query object". That would only be first step. You then need to get the info from the query object. You could either try making a custom relationship bond with the nodes or build your own filter to make the SQL needed. This can quickly become a confusing time sink.
Instead, I would suggest that you use hook_views_query_alter, which will allow you to alter the query. Since you already have the SQL, it's just a matter of checking for the hash, and if it's there, alter the query. Should be a pretty simple thing to do. Only thing that is a bit tricky, is that you have to make the query with the query object that views uses, but it's not that hard to figure out.
I'm using jQuery, ASP.NET, SQL Server, and the other usual suspects to design a company CRM. After they put in contact info, notes, dates, places and so forth they have to be able to select many different people to be "CC'ed." A group of people will be required to be one either "CC'ed" or "ToDo." The rest of the people can be nothing or "CC" or "ToDo." Currently we have it set up as a huge databind to templates with radio buttons for each option. Looks like shit. Anyone have any suggestions? I'd like to use a template with a datasource and have a good way to retrieve their answers and use them.
I'm leaning jQuery direction but like I said I'll need there to be up to 3 possible options for the people. This is going to be all opinion so I'm just looking for options.
Just to re-clarify, this concept is similar to email but I don't want them to have to type anything in as it is a set group of names that they're allowed to select from.
Looking for quick simple and pretty. somewhere in the range of 120 names.
If you intend to look down the jQuery route, I suggest that this widget could possibly help you out (even if only for inspiration sakes). http://quasipartikel.at/multiselect/
I'm struggling to "visualize" your form for terms of "real-estate expendature" etc.
Not directly what you are looking for, but this plugin may help
http://devgrow.com/slidernav-jquery-plugin/
Typing with intellisense. Sorry - any graphical thing will look overloaded.
Or: A table with filter options on top (again, typing). THere simply is no other way.
What I would most likely do to achieve this is implement the auto filter pattern that you type in a text box a few letters of the name and then it would filter down all of the overall results to those containing that pattern. Then have a select all button that will let you check all of them, and then the user can manually uncheck a few instead of having to check all.
The other thing to do would be to offer some type of categorization of the data so that they could filter by category that would put people in probable groups that would want all them all together. Like IT, HR, Executive or something similar.
Hello :) I posted this same question on a drupal-oriented site, but didn't get any replies at all. I grumbled to myself and wished that the site was more like StackOverflow, so I thought, why not try asking it here :)
I'm playing around with a view that displays nodes belonging to a taxonomy term. The vocabulary also has a taxonomy nodequeue with subqueues for all the terms.
So far the view has one argument, taxonomy term ID, and is sorted by post date. But what if I wanted to display all of the nodes of a particular term, with all the nodequeue nodes on top, and all the non-nodequeue nodes (but still under this particular taxonomy term) below, sorted by date?
To clarify, say this is my vocabulary, we'll call it 'living stuff'
Plant
--Fruit
--Vegetable
Animal
--Fish
--Dinosaurs
The following nodes are found under Dinosaurs:
Tyrannosaurus Rex (added 2009-01-01)
Megalosaurus (added 2009-01-02)
Velociraptor (added 2009-01-03)
Brachiosaurus (added 2009-01-04)
Since tyrannosauruses and velociraptors are extra awesome dinosaurs, they're also added to the nodequeue living stuff, subqueue dinosaurs:
The subqueue:
Velociraptor
Tyrannosaurus rex
The final view should display them in this order:
Velociraptor (it's first in the NQ)
Tyrannosaurus Rex (2nd in NQ)
Brachiosaurus (of the remaining dinosaurs, this is the newest)
Megalosaurus (oldest non-queue dinosaur)
I created a relationship to a nodequeue, but it wouldn't let me pick a subqueue, I could only limit to the 'living stuff' nodequeue.
My first view argument is term ID, so I thought that if I added "Nodequeue: subqueue reference" as the second argument, I'd get the expected behavior, but this only shows the dinosaurs listed in the nodequeue.
Any help or suggestions on this problem would be highly appreciated. Thanks!
I haven't really tried much with nodequeues' subqueues, so I'm not completely certain of this. But from my experience with nodequeues, it seems like when using views, you are limited to the basic things they support and can't really do the type of customization you are looking for. I think your best bet, would be to create your own views sort handler, where you can sort it like this. It will probably be quite tricky to make such a handler, since you have to figure out both views and nodequeues in order to make it work. You should really give it some thought if it would be worth it before venturing down that path, unless you have done this sort of things with views before.
More hacks:
A work-around for the behavior your trying to accomplish might be to forgo using nodequeues at all. I'm not sure the entire impetus for using the nodequeues nor the importance of dates, but faced with similar issues before, I've been able to tackle it using the following:
Sticky
Modified dates
If you sticky your super-cool dinosaurs, and modify the published dates of the elements so that they match your order, you could produce what you're looking for in a single view. It's sorta hokey, and it's predicated on not really caring about publishing dates (something that always depends on situation) nor having a more pressing reason for using a nodequeue. That said, if you don't need the nodequeue or the dates, it's a workable solution.
The 2-view solution by Jeremy should be workable, too, and I'd say that's another common way to handle the given scenario.
Hacky solution warning!
Have your primary view in your page with the nodequeue items.
Create another view which is exposed as a block for the non nodequeue items. Put this block in the main content region and limit it to only show on URLs which are the same as the first view.
You may have to do some fiddling with the url variables but I think it will work.
Why don't you concatenate the views behind each nodequeue? (each nodequeue generates a view)
You can add a header (see 'Basic Settings' in view edit page) to the second nodequeue that contains php code that invokes views_embed_view('first nodequeue') (you just need to change the header's input format to 'php'). Or rather, create a custom view that includes each nodequeue by invoking views_embed_view(). This would effectively place one nodequeue on top of another, and if they are of the same format/content type you don't even need to mess around with fields: you can use Row Style == Node. As far as your arguments, they can be passed to views_embed_view, as the third parameter (the docs don't say that AFAICR, but I found a post in the forums (http://drupal.org/node/99721) that indicated args can be sent as '$current_view->args' to the view being embedded).
HTH