Re-using Express associations more than once in the same Express association relationship

Developing with Concrete
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Okay so this is a little challenging to explain, bear with me.

Some of you may or may not know that a while back @hissy put together Express Association Attributes, single and multi select kind of deal. Whereby as an Attribute as opposed to an Association, you could interact with other Express Entities in seemingly useful ways.

However it turns out that method didn’t quite pan out (last I checked) and the Devs (@andrew and others) pointed me instead to just use the Associations “method” instead for get/set of info through the associations. And generally that’s not only worked reliably, it’s met my functional needs… until recently.

The challenge I have right now is that I have two Express Entities (Events and Gaming Types) which I want to use the Association between them in “more than just one way” so to say.

So we have the two Express Entities “Events” and “Gaming Types”.

Events, each Entry represents an “Event” and there’s a bunch of Attributes, Associations, and one of those Associations is to “Gaming Types”.

Gaming Types, has only one attribute and that is a simple Select List, and in that list is a different type of Gaming per list entry.

I want within Events to “pick” a different set of “Gaming Types” in two different ways, BYO (Bring Your Own) and Provided. Naturally there’s going to be lots of times I want to select (association Entry for “Gaming Types”) DIFFERENT “Gaming Types” for BYO and different “Gaming Types” for Provided, they need to be able to have independent selections.

However, with the “recommended method” of using the built-in Associations capabilities, I only see the means to be able to have one set of selections of “Gaming Types” per Event Entry, but I want to be able to have two (or more if I come up with “future reasons”) distinct sets of selections of “Gaming Types” per Event Entry.

Now, I suspect Hissy’s original Express Attributes method likely isn’t the way to go, but I’m not ruling that out. And I don’t see how to do it with any built-in capabilities, where the two Express Entities are directly Associated, and you can have two distinct selections of associated Entries per Event Entry.

Does anyone know of a way I can achieve this functional need without creating more Express Entities to work as an intermediary between the Events and Gaming Types? I’m really stuck trying to find an elegant solution here.

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Yeah really would benefit from some elegant way to do this. Whenever I want to use an association in an Express Entity for more than 1 functional list of selections, I’m so far I really do have to create an additional intermediary Express Entity to complete the gap.

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Sounds like an interesting quandary, @BloodyIron - let me do some digging and get back with you.

1 Like
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Thanks! Much appreciated! :slight_smile:

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@BloodyIron is this similar to what you want to do: Reusing the same Express entity in multiple associations :: Concrete CMS

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No this is about using a Single Association, between the same Express Entities, in more than one way, at the same time.

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@BloodyIron it sounds like you want to filter the list of Gaming Types based on whether the entries have the BYO or Preferred attributes. Is that correct? Similar to this screenshot, but with the selection limited in that way?

Screenshot 2024-04-12 at 14.50.46
Screenshot 2024-04-12 at 14.50.461668×1138 46.1 KB

If that’s the case, you’re going to have to use a bit of a hack with intermediary express entities as you mentioned, or another Express entity with possibly duplicated data (Gaming Types BYO and Gaming Types Provided). Or if in code you can filter by both attribute and association to limit the selection list: Express Basics :: Concrete CMS