Comments on: Creating a custom compound field for CCK

By: Adam

Adam — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 23:18:39 +0000

Is there a way to expand this with multiple values for the field type?

By: Christian Roy

Christian Roy — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 18:48:14 +0000

@Andrey Tretyakov: It is true that with your own CCK field type in a custom module, it is up to you to convert to D6 when the time comes. However, to me that is a pro. Otherwise, I am dependent on other module authors to convert their module to D6. Some modules becomes abandoned and therefor will never be converted to D6.

@aws: The CCK developers are currently working on that for D6:
http://drupal.org/node/119102

By: dnorman

dnorman — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 00:33:21 +0000

Yeah. With CCK now, you can sort of approximate this, but not with the granularity of control for tying values together…

By: aws

aws — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 22:54:25 +0000

The fieldgroup table does not work for this purpose. A compound field must be able to handle multiple instances of multiple-value fields, not just making a table over a group of multiple-value fields.

IMHO this is a deep problem with CCK and needs to be addressed by the CCK developers. For example, its interaction with view filters will be significantly more complex than for non-compound fields.

With the currently available methods, one must use a node-reference and a separate CCK node type for each compound-type. This however creates some ugly problems with usability for creating and editing nodes. Subform, autonode, and some other stuff might help, I don’t know.

By: dnorman

dnorman — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 23:23:27 +0000

I don’t have any plans for that right now - none of my sites run on D6 yet because I use modules that still don’t run on it…

By: Tim

Tim — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 09:28:57 +0000

This is a great tutorial! Looks very useful. Do you have any plans to port this tutorial for Drupal 6?

By: Andrey Tretyakov

Andrey Tretyakov — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 17:01:20 +0000

Heh, for anyone reading this in future, it is possible to make views containing fields from 2 node types with “Views fusion” module. So I’m gonna try that road, wish me luck

By: Andrey Tretyakov

Andrey Tretyakov — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 16:41:18 +0000

Thinking about pro’s and con’s again.
Say, we have integer ‘age’ field in profile (for clarity, not core profile but node-based, such as Bio ) , and separate node type for education degree.
What if we want to make view of people of certain age and having certain degrees ?
With compound degree field, as far as I understand, this is easy

By: Andrey Tretyakov

Andrey Tretyakov — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 16:30:51 +0000

Hey D’Arcy
There is error in your guide

function universitydegrees_field_settings($op, $field) {
switch ($op) {

case ’save’:
return array(’year’, ‘degreetype’, ‘programme’, ‘institution’);

You don’t need to save these here - I think ’save’ in this function is for saving field settings but you are saving field values

More on topic:
First, I tried module ‘fieldgroup table’ and it worked for me only with “text field” widget types. Select, checkboxes, radio etc won’t work. So it kind of kills all the pro’s of this module. Also there is big limitation in that you can only have 1 value per row.

Then I tried your path for making my money commission field, and now, using your guide and modules ‘link’, ‘money’, ‘education_field’ as examples, I made my custom “commission” field type. So kudos for posting this.

But now I face problems of removing bugs, testing and all this is hell for me ’cause I’m not experienced developer. Looking at this comment:
—
With that said, either way will work — but maintaining a compound field, creating views integration, and generalizing/exposing the admin features via a clean UI is a lot of work — to say nothing of the work involved in maintaining this code over time.
—
I now have feeling that compount field is probably wrong way. Making lots of nodes is not big problem (adding more hardware is easy and cheap these days ). But if I have my custom compound field, what if I want to upgrade to D6 in,say, 6-8 months ? Then I will need to upgrade my module, and if its already hell for me, it will not be easier in future…

So for any non-experienced programmer, I would recommend to go with separate node solution, and helper modules such as addnode, nodereference or node relativity and such. This way you only develop small portion of code and most of the code is maintained and supported by community

By: dillon

dillon — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 02:29:49 +0000

Ah the elusive combo/compound field. I looked at the Fieldgroup Table module, but the module is for D5 (and even then there isn’t a version that works with 5.8). That’s fine, I’d rather solve this problem in D6.

I tried myself to update this for D6 - but without any luck.

Any chance you might be doing that in the near future?