Thread

Howdy-

We’re building a site that will depend heavily on relationships.  It has a blog with 50,000 entries; almost all other blogs will relate to this main blog. 

We’d like to find a better way to populate the relationship field than a 50,000-row dropdown.  An AJAXy suggest box seems like a good fit, but maybe there are other options.

Has anyone seen an addon that provides the related entries interface we need?

Thanks!
Justin

playa might be better - I haven’t used it yet, but it’s very popular and I believe it uses a multi-select rather than a dropdown.

Good point, Sean.  We’re checking Playa out, and it looks like it’d do the trick.  But I think we’ll have to upgrade PHP to make it work, which isn’t a sure thing yet.  So if anyone else has seen something like this, let us know!

Thanks!

Alternative approach would be using categories to ‘relate’ entries.
Bigger question is how is your site structured that you have 1 entry related to 50,000 others?
If there really needs to be a relation…isn’t putting all the entries into 1 weblog what you are after?

Considering the amount of entries I don’t think even Playa will look attractive after loading up a list of 50 thousand entries…

Bigger question is how is your site structured that you have 1 entry related to 50,000 others? If there really needs to be a relation…isn’t putting all the entries into 1 weblog what you are after?

Sorry for the confusion.

I want to relate one new entry, from weblog A, to one existing entry, from weblog B, when I publish a new entry in weblog A.  Weblog B has 50,000 entries in it.

Using a relationship field would appear to make this possible using a dropdown, but a dropdown isn’t a great way to pick one entry from 50,000.

Playa might do it, if we can get PHP5 going.  But if anyone else has seen another way to do it, I’d love to hear it.

Justin

Ah 😊
I would still add categories to your entries because it will make your life easier when it comes to sorting/filtering down the entries even if you do use Playa. Other than this extension I can not think of anything that would help with the interface and selection; you would need to some form of pagination and browsing/filtering at least to say. Sorry, I was not much of a help on this one.

Not sure whether it’s been improved yet but the last time I tried Playa 2 it loads all entries (which you can then filter) but for me with 20k entries it crippled the site so I don’t fancy your chances with 50k.

I know Brandon was talking about a pre-filter so that not all entries were initially loaded, which in my opinion it needs for a larger site to be viable.

Take a look at SolSpace’s relationship module. It works by searching on title keyword(s) instead of preloading the list, and you can search a single weblog or across all weblogs.

In reading this I can’t help but think of how messy EE handles relational links.  The above problem would not exist if EE handled or had an alternative way to handle relationships, that being the way they are handled in the rest of the Database world. Meaning relating one FIELD in one database to another FIELD in another database and not entry to entry.  It seems silly to do it the way EE does it.  It is kiindergardenish and frustrating.  Then Playa makes it worst by improving on a bad idea. 

Please can you give us the option of field to field relationships?! It is badly needed and a better implementation of relationships.  And EE should eliminate all those suggested drop down choices when one is typing in data into the publish forms.  It is annoying.  Is there a way to turn off that “feature”?

Sorry, but it is truly frustrating that I can not implement real relational links.