Have you seen http://drupal.org/node/119102 ? -- you might want to skip to the second page and only read comments 301-600 -- You could also check out http://drupal.org/project/education_field and http://drupal.org/project/employment_field, although the approach used in the patch will likely allow more options over time. Cheers, Bill Yuval Hager wrote:
I am writing an application in which I need a compound cck field - a nodereference and a numerical value. The underlying database table MUST keep both values in the same record (no "delta" based value matching, like CCK multigroup does), so I reverted to writing my own CCK compound field module.
However, I am having a hard time understanding if I can reuse the elements declared by the nodereference and the number module for my case. I am trying, for example, to use '#type' => 'nodereference_autocomplete' in my element #process function, but maybe I do not need to define an element at all? Maybe I should just use it in hook_widget? Also, How can I convince nodereference and number to work on MY definition of #columns? This goes for validation, autocompletion and value (stripping out the "[nid:]"). I am not finding good documentation for this, and the code for other modules who do similar stuff is rather confusing (I looked at a few). Before I revert to voodoo or code duplication - can anybody shed some light on the subject? If needed, I can paste my (non working) code here.
There are a few documentation points for this on the net - the best I've found is http://poplarware.com/cckfieldmodule.html by Jennifer Hodgdon. Thank you Jennifer, this is a great guide. However, this guide delegates a lot of functionality to filefield/imagefield, and my case is quite different. CCK documentation on these hooks is rather laconic, or not up to date with the latest version.
This also makes me wonder if one can write a generic compound CCK field module, that will allow the user to reuse existing fields and build a new one using the UI only. But first things first - the specific case should work before the generic one :)
Cheers,
--yhager
-- Bill Fitzgerald http://funnymonkey.com FunnyMonkey -- Click. Connect. Learn. ph. 503 897 7160