Book to Book-Pages... Many to many relationship??
Here's my situation: I'm in the process of importing dozens of paper (Word document) manuals into my Drupal intranet site as books. One of the main goals of this project is to reduce redundancy... in the word-document / file share set up, each manual is duplicated five times, once for each region in which my company operates. Some of the documents are identical across all regions, yet we still maintain 5 copies of the document. (Yikes!) Others are unique to a region (thus the separate copies of the manuals). This brings us to my dilema: It seems that the book module won't allow the same node to be placed in multiple books, meaning my goal of redundancy reduction is out the window! Does anyone have any suggestions about how to accomplish the functionality I'm looking for (adding a single node to multiple books)? I'm sure I could hack the book module to make it work, but I've really been trying not to tamper with core modules. Has there been any discussion on this topic before? Does anyone wish to discuss the possibility of adding this to the book module officially? Thanks for any input. Dan
Dan, This is a non-trivial undertaking because you need to be able to maintain your context (i.e. which book are you currently browsing, so that you know which page is the next/previous, etc.) some related links: An existing contrib module: http://drupal.org/project/relativity This implements more general tree structures and could provide useful code and ideas. Discussions of a "relationship API" on g.d.o: http://groups.drupal.org/node/1966 http://groups.drupal.org/node/1323 -Peter On 6/8/07, Daniel Hilton <dunghopper@gmail.com> wrote:
Here's my situation:
I'm in the process of importing dozens of paper (Word document) manuals into my Drupal intranet site as books.
One of the main goals of this project is to reduce redundancy... in the word-document / file share set up, each manual is duplicated five times, once for each region in which my company operates. Some of the documents are identical across all regions, yet we still maintain 5 copies of the document. (Yikes!) Others are unique to a region (thus the separate copies of the manuals).
This brings us to my dilema: It seems that the book module won't allow the same node to be placed in multiple books, meaning my goal of redundancy reduction is out the window!
Does anyone have any suggestions about how to accomplish the functionality I'm looking for (adding a single node to multiple books)?
I'm sure I could hack the book module to make it work, but I've really been trying not to tamper with core modules.
Has there been any discussion on this topic before? Does anyone wish to discuss the possibility of adding this to the book module officially?
Thanks for any input.
Dan
I had a similar need with a recent project. Although I was not using book module, this idea may help Dan. I made the site so that multiple URLs could show the same node. Here's a real life example to show what I mean... Start here: http://theorphanage.com/ocp/portfolio/director/1054. This url is a view, and 1054 is the term id of the director who is featured on the page. Note the links on the right. Each of the four projects is a node. If you click on the first you get brought to http://theorphanage.com/ocp/portfolio/director/1054/1009. In this case 1009 is the node id. But note that the URL is not ?q=node/1009. Instead the node id is appended to the prior URL. And this information is used to maintain the navigation on the left. Again, not using books here. Using views, and making the node id an argument to the view. Just to drive the point home, here's the same node shown with a different left navigation: http://theorphanage.com/ocp/portfolio/recent/1009 I hope that helps at least a little bit. -Dave On Friday 08 June 2007 01:26:29 pm Peter Wolanin wrote:
Dan,
This is a non-trivial undertaking because you need to be able to maintain your context (i.e. which book are you currently browsing, so that you know which page is the next/previous, etc.)
On 6/8/07, Daniel Hilton <dunghopper@gmail.com> wrote:
Here's my situation:
I'm in the process of importing dozens of paper (Word document) manuals into my Drupal intranet site as books.
One of the main goals of this project is to reduce redundancy... in the word-document / file share set up, each manual is duplicated five times, once for each region in which my company operates. Some of the documents are identical across all regions, yet we still maintain 5 copies of the document. (Yikes!) Others are unique to a region (thus the separate copies of the manuals).
Off the top of my head, talking of no-redundancy, a solution could be to use category tags (taxonomy module) for the different regions and just tag the books. You could use a different node type for the "cover page" of the books and tag only that one as the only entry point for navigation in a particular book. So, you could bring up listings of "cover page" nodes of books per region.
This brings us to my dilema: It seems that the book module won't allow the same node to be placed in multiple books, meaning my goal of redundancy reduction is out the window!
Does anyone have any suggestions about how to accomplish the functionality I'm looking for (adding a single node to multiple books)?
I'm sure I could hack the book module to make it work, but I've really been trying not to tamper with core modules.
Has there been any discussion on this topic before? Does anyone wish to discuss the possibility of adding this to the book module officially?
Thanks for any input.
Dan
participants (4)
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Cog Rusty -
Daniel Hilton -
Dave Cohen -
Peter Wolanin