Gotcha, I suppose taxonomy does this to an extent - and Bèr project seems to be building on that. I was just curious about the desired relationship. Clearly its more than just parent child. I'll be taking a look at this when its done. andre Robert Douglass wrote:
I think the goal is to have views that are composed of more than one node. This is something Drupal doesn't support in any way, really, at this point. The best you can do is either use a filter to spit some output into the body of a node, in which case both nodes are unaware of the association, or attach a node to another which ususally takes the form of lumping their combined output onto one page.
As I understand it, Mark is writing a module where you can make complex n level relations between nodes. This will help us move away from Drupal's almost exclusive web-publishing content-oriented features (blogs, books, pages, stories, articles) and approach the needs of the web-application developer who models data and relationships, collects that data, and presents it in different views.
I'll take an example from Gavin King's Hibernate book. There he models Cats. Cats can have relationships to other Cats. In fact, they can have three types of relationship; parent-child, rival, mate. When objects (nodes) are aware of their relationships you can do queries. You can then say, "give me all Cats who are rivals of this Cat", or "give me all Cats who are mates of this Cat's rivals", or "give me all Cats who have no mate".
You can also have complex views. When showing a Cat, you not only show it's information (name, age, color), but also what it's relationships are. In the best case you can theme these as you wish. Perhaps you want hyperlinks to their pages, or perhaps you just want to display thier name and color. In any case, from the context of Cat X, you can access the information of Cat Z just because the two of them are joined by a relationship.
Not that Mark's module is going to be able to do all this right off, but I think this is the type of functionality he is dreaming of.
-Robert
Andre Molnar wrote:
Mark, this may seem like a very silly question, but what will your module do that book.module doesn't do - or what doesn't book.module do that you need?
andre