Symphony.

when I do a git pull, it still says it’s enabled afterwards.

It will only be disabled if the version number changed. So everything is fine at the moment.

@wtdan, I’m sure I’ve read that it’s only if the delegates change that you’d need to do that, is that right Nils? Plus I don’t think they will have…

@designermonkey, right i read that about the delegates, but after reading that, i was thinking it was for any update

I think for updating the delegates it should be sufficient to just re-enable the already enabled extension. But I only ever had the need to do this during extension development. If you are working with a final release the update process should take care of all this. And as I said, an extension only runs the updater when its version number changed.

So if you like to use this beta just upload the most up-to-date files. If anything fundamental needs to be updated the extension will be automatically deactivated and you just will have to re-enable it.

(Insert standard newbie disclaimer here - feel free to ignore my comments if they don’t agree with symphony goals)

I’ve been getting my feet wet with Symphony and Subsection Manager, and I love it. My observations:

It seems the most obvious application of this extension is to create submission forms which allow inline creation or intelligent searching and selection of entries of other sections. As such, the relationships which might be used are:

• one-to-one
• many-to-one
• one-to-many
• many-to-many

The option to ‘Allow selection of multiple items’ seems to separate the first two from the second two. The ‘Allow selection of items from a list of existing items’ seems to separate one-to-x from many-to-x relationships. This works well, except for one caveat:

With one-to-x relationships, I typically don’t want orphan entries in the child section. These are created when someone ‘creates’ a subsection entry and then removes it without deleting it. This can be minimized by deselecting ‘Allow deselection of items’, but it doesn’t completely eliminate it. Basically, entries which are created can be deselected regardless of the ‘Allow deselection of items’ preference until the parent entry is saved. Example:

1. Set up a section with a subsection manager field with ‘Allow deselection of items’ unchecked
2. Navigate to that section’s content management page
3. Click ‘new entry’
4. In a subsection manager field, click ‘create new’
5. Enter required info and click ‘create entry’

At this point, an ‘x’ appears next to your new entry. When it is clicked on, the subsection entry is not deleted, but just removed from the parent entry, creating an orphan subsection entry. The ‘x’ only disappears after you save the parent entry. As a minor UI tweak, I would suggest moving the ‘delete’ button from the entry detail to the entry summary when ‘Allow deselection of items’ is unchecked, but this doesn’t really solve orphans.

Navigating away from the create page without creating the parent entry also leaves orphans, but this is much harder to solve I suppose. Likewise, dealing with orphans in many-to-x relationships is hard also, since there has to be more extensive error checking: when I remove a link to a subsection entry, was it the only remaining link to that subsection entry? If so, do I want to delete the subsection entry or just remove the link?

Ultimately, I love the UI of this extension and the search functionality makes it MUCH easier to deal with than a selectbox for sections with lots of entries. I find myself confused though, in how I really should be creating and managing relationships in symphony. The default selectbox link field handles x-to-many and x-to-one relationships, but doesn’t allow any control over whether you want a one-to-x or many-to-x relationship. Subsection Manager offers some control over one-to-x (select Allow creation of new items and deselect Allow selection of items from a list of existing items) or many-to-x (select Allow selection of items from a list of existing items), but there is no real handling of orphans.

My apologies if I shouldn’t be posting this in this thread, but I guess my quest for rails-like relationship definitions led me to Subsection Manager since it’s more flexible than the select box link, but it’s not quite the same as granular relationships like in rails.

Two questions: Am I thinking of relationships within symphony the right way? How do you usually handle situations where you want to enforce specific types of relationships?

Thanks for the great extension, I guess I’m just having a hard time wrapping my head around symphony best practices when designing data model relationships.

Thanks for your feedback, Eric.

There are two problems in the current Subsection Manager setup:

• It does not care about orphans at all.
• Some setting combination result in unwanted interface behaviour.

Have a look at these posts.

For me there is not one Symphony way to create relationships. And Subsection Manager is introducing new options that need to be improved over time. The questions are: Which relationships are really needed and how should we deal with the edge cases?

Has anyone seen these issues:

1. Subsection manager showing up twice on your Extensions page
2. The captions not showing up when you create/browse items?

I mentioned #2 before, but obviously I haven’t implemented a solution for it.

Attachments:

Screen shot 2010-08-25 at 11.04.59 AM.png and Screen shot 2010-08-25 at 11.01.16 AM.png

• #1 doesn’t make sense to me unless there is a strange bug in the Symphony core.
• #2 should be fixed in the development branch.

it’s only happening with the subsection manager extension haha

do i just need to switch branches to get that resolved? or do i need to also disable/enable the extension as well?

You should just switch branches and clear your browser cache.

it’s only happening with the subsection manager extension haha

Well, I’m not aware of anything special I did to make this happen :)

i think my git repo was messed up and for some reason i apparently made changes to this extension on my own build (though I don’t remember doing that). but i had to do some git-trickery to get the development branch to work.

should have cleared my cache before disabling the extension though…good thing this is on my own site so i don’t really care about losing these references right now

does the dev branch also have the “count”, like what the select box link keeps track of?

does the dev branch also have the “count”, like what the select box link keeps track of?

No, it doesn’t. And it will most likely not be in the initial release of this extension but it’s on the list for the following release.

Last Call for Mr. and Mrs. Symphony

I just fixed the last outstanding issues that are relevant for the release of version 1.0. So please update your installs based on the development branch and check the issue tracker on GitHub if your bugs have been fixed or postponed for version 1.1.

Please note that the drag and drop feature is considered experimental for the 1.0 release and will be improved in version 1.1.

There is one mysterious bug left which is connected to hitting the enter/return button. If anyone has got a clue what might cause this issue, please drop me a line.

Subsection Manager 1.0

Version 1.0final has just been released.
Please consider this thread closed.

Subsection Manager updated to version 1.0 on 27th of August 2010

http://getsymphony.com/discuss/thread/50421/