Nedjo raised a question today concerning CiviNode's CCK widgets. civicrmdata.module implements a widget type that is a lot like nodereference and userreference, except it points to a contact record in CiviCRM, a PHP contact relation management package. Right now, it's possible to select an existing contact (via its "contact_id" field), and choose what CiviCRM calls a "profile". This is different than Drupal's profile; it represents a sort of window into a contact by selecting which fields of the contact record you want displayed. Currently, civicrmdata uses the CiviCRM profile to theme and render how the the "contact" displays when a CCK node renders its "view". Nedjo wants tighter integration; he wants to display and be able to edit a single field of a contact record. This makes a lot of sense, but it isn't clear how best to implement this with CCK's hooks. Here are some of the issues; * Typically, you want a group of CCK fields that are all related to the same CiviCRM contact object, say as example to indicate "who to contact" as part of a CCK node. If you change the person you want to contact, you need all of the dependent fields to point to that new CiviCRM contact. It would be very helpful if the contact_id could be changed in one and only one place, and have the CCK fields that point to the fields of the contact change in lock-step. Is this how calculated fields (in the contributed module) work, and is this the right model? * CiviCRM contact records have a fairly large memory footprint, and calling the CiviCRM APIs for fetching contacts takes processor time, so ideally, you want to fetch a contact object at most once per node (less if you cache between nodes). Is it possible to cache this information at the node level to allow the first field to render do the fetch, and all other fields pull from the cache. * When a contact field is edited, order matters; you don't want to write to the CiviCRM data store until all of a contact's 'dependent fields' have reported their changes. So it sounds like an update needs to happen in two phases. Can this be done with CCK (and Drupal's) current hooks,and if so, which ones do I need to look at. I wrote a good piece of civicrmdata's code, so I'm at least a bit familiar with CCK's hooks. But the above issues stump me. Can anyone shed light on this problem? Thanks, Rob Rob Thorne Torenware Networks http://www.torenware.com