i have a decent understanding of configuring drupal and using modules for basic stuff, but just getting into module development and overriding functions and stuff due to my very basic understanding of php and mysql.
i have a custom content type ('books') and a 3 cck field for genres (primary, secondary, tertiary). i'd like a user to be able to filter a view of all books with one exposed multi-selectable 'genre' filter. that's where i'm stuck-- i understand how to have three exposed filters for the 3 genre 'weights' (primary, secondary, tertiary)--i want one filter that would allow users to select any or all of those weights.
is a custom search form my only option? was there a better way to set things up? would i have been better off using one cck field for 'genres' with multiple entries? i ruled this out because i thought it would be harder to determine the genre 'weight' (primary, secondary, tertiary).
thanks a million.
Think about what the meaning of genres to a book is. Taxonomy is just what you use for this kind of thing. There are several pros using the taxonomy rather than using CCK fields.
Taxonomy is meta data, CCK fields are not. This mean that the way the html is generated for taxonomy terms, it will help SE to understand that these genres are important and it will give you a free SEO
You can setup how genres should be selected in far more detail than a CCK field. Again since taxonomy is made for exactly this kind of thing. You can setup how users are presentated with the genre selection in various ways. You can predefine genres or let users enter their own as they like. You can make child-parent relation ships and more
It's easier and more lightweight to use taxonomy than CCK fields.
If there only is 1 or 2 genre inputted you wont have to have empty CCK fields.
probably more that I can't think of right now
Using taxonomy you can pretty easily make a search with views, where you make it possible for users to select genres using a multiple select list. You can decide if you require all terms or only one of them. Simply put you should really use taxonomy, it should solve all of your problems, if not, you should still use it and try to solve the problems you could get using taxonomy instead of CCK fields.
Jergason has a good point saying that taxonomy would probably be a good fit for your fields. However this wouldn't solve your problem of weighted genres.
A possible (though hacky) solution would be to have a fourth field which combined the values of the other three which is only set when a node is saved. This field could then be used for searching.
The non hacky solution is to write your own views filter but this is very advanced.
There may be a way to do this with views out of the box it is flexible, hopefully someone else knows of an easier non hacky solution.
Related
My apologies if this has been asked before. I'm looking for a way to group fields in a flexible way. Much like a repeatable field, but each new row would have the option of being a different pre-defined group of fields.
This is critical with any site I build as it allows the content creators flexibility to re-use components on different "pages" in different orders.
I've been pouring over all the field types and the pagemanager add on trying to figure out a way that I could come up with this type of functionality.
Perhaps I could create a "template" field in the repeatable field that hides/shows certain fields in the group, but the number of fields would stack up and that would have to have javascript to hide/show fields and handle validation. Seems a bit hacky.
Am I missing a solution? Thank you for your time.
I have some global variables $$A, $$B, $$C and what to search within a table for these terms in fieldA, fieldB and fieldC (using Perform Find). How can I use the result of this Perform Find to display the results in a portal.
The implementation by my predecessor replaces a field fieldSEARCHwith 1 if it is in the Perform Find results and 0 otherwise, and then uses a portal filtered by this field. This seems a very dodgey way of doing it, not least becuase it means that multiple users will not be able to search at the same time!
Can you enhance the portal filter to filter against the variables themselves? Or you can perform the find, grab IDs of the found set, put them into a global field, and then use the field to construct the relationship. Global fields are multi-user safe.
The best way is not to do this at all, but use list views to perform searches. List views are naturally searchable and much more flexible than portals (you can easily sort them, omit arbitrary records, and so on). It's possible to repeat this functionality in portals, but it's way more complex. I mean, if there's some serious gain from using a portal, then it's doable, but if not, then the native way is obviously better.
List views are easier to search, as FileMaker still hasn't transitioned to the 21st century and insists on this model... Most users however want a Master-Detail view, like a mail app, and understandably so as it's more intuitive (i.e. produce a list view on one side, but clicking on it updates detail/fields in the middle).
If this is what you want, you may want to cast an eye at Modular FM, where someone has already done the hard work for you:
http://www.modularfilemaker.org/module/masterdetail-2-0/
HTH
Stam
Hi I'm new to mongoDB and Mongoid and am little bit confused on when to use embedded documents and how deep to embedd.
So a fictional example:
Library collection has_many :books, which embeds_many :pages, which embeds_many :sections
Since I cannot work with say a Section directly I have to go trough books.pages.sections, right?
This would result in this route, libraries/:id/books/:id/pages/:id/sections/:id
Which seems a little bit crazy, best practice would be to only nest one level deep, right?
One way would be to have the route pages/:id/sections/:id and then stick the bookid in the request?
Would it be harder to query on say, sections? For example if I need to find all the books where sections has tag x?
However if I don't embedd all the way I would have an extra query?
Can someone shed some light? Thanks.
First of I believe that no one can give you the right answer about how deeply you should embed documents. It is highly dependent on your concrete project requirements. In general you should answer some questions to choose appropriate schema design:
Will users concurrently update same object in collection? (or what would my boss say if clients lost their updates)
Do I need support atomic operations?
Do I need to independently show nested collections or are they queried with the parent?
Do I need to sort embedded objects?
Do I need to query on embedded objects?
If you will answer 1,2-true; 3 I need show them independently (different page); 4,5 - true then i am sure that embedding will be some kind of pain in your ass.
Extra queries should not be a problem I guess.
I am thinking of creating a web site, which lets people to rate restaurants. Since I don't have a database containing all the restaurants, this web site relies on user's inputs.
But there is a problem of this method, because people may use different word (name) to describe a same restaurant, but I don't want to create different entries inside the database, as they refer to the same restaurant.
For example, when describing KFC, somebody use the name "KFC", others may use "Kentucky Fried Chicken"
How can I make the system to automatically detect this? and give the user a list of existing items of the database.
This should quite similar to stackoverflow, which tells you "questions with similar title". But I don't know how to implement this.
You can't ... you have to create a list of the restaurant names and their "synonyms" and other possible spellings.
How can I make the system to automatically detect this?
The system doesn't know that "KFC" means "Kentucky Fried Chicken".
Make a map of synonyms, to let it know.
This should quite similar to stackoverflow, which tells you "questions with similar title"
It generally matches word-for-word. It may have an internal list of synonyms to deal with common cases.
I have CCK Members (title, age, ...) and because of the huge number of members I have, it would be tiresome to update some of the fields (sample below is age-field) one-by-one.
I need a way to build something like picture below with Drupal 6/7. Is this possible using Views? if not, any suggestions?
Here's the link for my illustration
http://i.stack.imgur.com/F9SXM.png
thanks for any helps.
You can use Views Bulk Operations (VBO) to perform tasks on multiple nodes, users, etc at a time. I don't think the form will look the same way, but it will allow you to more easily update CCK fields (along with many other helpful operations) at one time.