[drupal-devel] Working around node_access in node/add

[Robert Douglass]

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
> 
> 
>