Entity Reference Create

Entity reference is not only becoming popular but the References project clearly states at the top of its home page:

References will most probably be deprecated in the near future in favor of Entity Reference, which should probably be considered first on fresh D7 projects.

(That's how all of my new projects are going...)

It looks like if this module is going to survive it's going to need to evolve. I hope it happens. I'll do whatever I can to help test a new version supporting entities.

see #1261574: Create reference if it doesn't exist
and http://drupal.org/project/field_collection

After a ton of research into this, I think I have my answer. It looks like this is getting taken care of in the Contextual Administration as it adapts to support the Entity Reference module. (http://drupal.org/node/1360498) Especially interesting is that it looks like their approach will ultimately be able to manage the creation of any new entities with the pre-population of entity references in addition to any other type of field. (cool!)

I think this probably warrants a status change for this issue. Feel free to turn it back if you feel otherwise...

I see my comment in #3 relates more to pre-populating the form for a new entity being created, and not so much the automatic (and invisible) creation of new entities using the tagging-style method. So, I'm still looking for something like Entity Reference Create.

Scott, can you elaborate on how field_collection can be used as a substitute for Entity Reference Create? I can't find any documentation or posted issues related to field_collection being used to automatically create related entities or nodes.

@videographics: a Field collection entity is always attached as a field to a parent entity. They can be created, updated or deleted - either on the parent entity's edit form (as a multiple delta field) - or individually from links on the parent entity display itself.

While Field collection (unlike Node reference create) has no 'reference' functionality - only 'create', it is possible to move a field collection from one parent entity to another with a custom function. Here's an example: #1280864: How do you copy a field collection from one node to another..

So Field collection is not exactly the same, but it does cover a big part of this use case, as well as the much sought after functionality that modules like flexifield, and the cck 3 multigroup module offered in D6. Try it out, and see if it works for you :)

@videographics it looks like what you're after is now being handled by Entityconnect:

Entityconnect expands the entity reference auto-complete field by adding a add new content and edit current content button.

@scottrigby Thanks for the ideas.

Field collection looks promising and there are clearly good people working hard on it, but realistically it's not stable enough yet for me to rely on it a this time.

Entityconnect looks useful since it doesn't require restructuring my content types and entities. In some ways it's nice to have an easy way to setup quick access to the related content's edit/new form, but I still wish I could create the other entity without being forced to load the whole form when it's not needed. Field collection should eventually do that so hopefully patience is all that's needed.

Fix link

Hi there

This may be controversial but I take the original premise of this post to relate to a "free tagging" method for creating new entities, rather than the click-and-create-in-new-window functionality offered by EntityConnect.

I tested EntityConnect for a while using an Open Atrium distribution. The interaction between the two was buggy and crashey so I had to abandon it. Also, it did not offer the kind of ease of use we are used to with things like taxonomy terms, where you get a natural free-tag/autocomplete combo.

It seems odd that with so much work on and with Entity Reference there seems no module yet that offers the same kind of usability as an autocomplete widget for creating taxonomy terms. If anyone knows of something like this for use with Entity Reference fields, please post here as I am sure others will be looking for this too if they are moving from taxonomy terms to entities.

really fix link

See https://drupal.org/project/entityreference_create for an effort in this direction.