Search

Hi,

This is quite a general question about associations, but I wondered how others handle explaining the association between two entries - i.e. attaching further information to that association.

I realise there's been a lot of discussion on associations, and several different extensions to handle it, but I'm curious about how people may have approached this with the existing infrastructure.

To illustrate with an example, suppose you have two sections, "books" and "people". Each book can be associated with a number of people, who could be authors, editors, contributors etc. So, for each entry in "people" that is associated with an entry in "books", the nature of the association also needs to be explained - i.e. is it the author, editor etc.

At the moment I have managed this by using multiple associative fields in the "books" section - one each for authors, contributors and so on. However, this is limiting in terms of how many options can be accommodated without ending up with an unmanageable fieldset. (In addition multiple associative fields pointing to the same section seem to disrupt the "include count of entries..." feature of DSs.)

I suppose the alternative would be a 'books-people associations' section, where each entry selects a book and a person in two associative fields, and then additional info can be added in e.g. a text input field. This seems pretty cumbersome in terms of workflow though.

Anyway, I don't mean to rehash the various discussions on associations, but I imagine some symphonists may have implemented similar cases, so it would be great to hear how others have handled it.

Thanks, Fish

Create an account or sign in to comment.

Symphony • Open Source XSLT CMS

Server Requirements

  • PHP 5.3-5.6 or 7.0-7.3
  • PHP's LibXML module, with the XSLT extension enabled (--with-xsl)
  • MySQL 5.5 or above
  • An Apache or Litespeed webserver
  • Apache's mod_rewrite module or equivalent

Compatible Hosts

Sign in

Login details