Automatic Parent Selection in Parent-Child node relationship

when I was developing our athletics club website. I wanted to associated news and results CCK types to event CCK types.

The event is created first (in advance of the event to produce a fixture list).

When the event has taken place, we add a news item and/or results to the event.

I used a method similar to that you described in point (2), though the parent/child relationships are done as menu items. I had to make some modifications to the menu.module for it to work (which is not ideal, and goes against best practice).

For example, if adding a news story to 'AAAChamps' event, the user navigates to the 'AAAChamps' event, which has a link to "/node/add/news/597/AAAChamps/" (I'm using clean URLs & 597 is the menuid for 'AAAChamps'). The site is www.kentac.org.uk if you want to see how results/news link to events.

Alternatively, the categories module may offer an alternative solution I tried it, but it had impact on other modules, especially image publishing and image gallery.

I'm relatively new to Drupal, so there may well be better ways of acheiving what you want, and I would be keen to know about them too.

Thank you all for this. For those of you who need a little more direction. Here is how we built our petition signing approach. We opted against doing it in a module but will revisit in D7.

1 - we have a cck type called Petition. Nothing fancy, just title and body with explanation guidelines.

2 - we have a block called 'Sign petition link'. The block displays in the content bottom region. The body of the block parses the URL for the current node id and appends it to a link to add the signpetition content type.
Body:

$url = request_uri();
$arguments = explode('/', $url);
$nid = array_pop($arguments);
$dest = 'add/signpetition/' . $nid;
echo '<a href="' . $dest . '">SIGN OUR PETITION</a>';

input format: php

page specific visibility settings:
show only if the following php code returns true:

  // Only show if $match is true
  $match = false;
  // Which node types
  $types = array('petition');
  // Match current node type with array of types
  if (arg(0) == 'node' && is_numeric(arg(1)) && arg(2) != 'edit') {
    $nid = arg(1);
    $node = node_load(array('nid' => $nid));
    $type = $node->type; 
    $match |= in_array($type, $types);
  }
  return $match;

3 - signpetition content type - contains whatever fields we want to get from the signer - firstname, lastname, address, etc. and a node reference field for petition. we use auto-nodetitles so the user does not title their signature form. the default value of the petition field including error handling is as follows:

$url = request_uri();
$arguments = explode('/', $url);
$nid = array_pop($arguments);

if (is_numeric($nid)) {
return array(0 => array('nid' => $nid ));
}
else {
return array(0 => array('nid' => 0 ));
}

4 - we create a field group on the signpetition form called invisible. we put the node reference to the petition in this group. we add the folllowing to our theme style.css:

fieldset.group-invisible {
display: none;
}

this hides the node reference from ALL users. We chose to put this in the css instead of using field permissions. The decision was that another layer of security was not warranted when in reality we simply wanted to create a hidden field not a non-existent field. hope this helps someone. it took us several days to get here and COMPLETE panic when the signit module exploded on us.

Thanks for this, I got the node reference link up and running.

Is it possible to use this method to pass over a node reference and a user reference at the same time?

Quicksketch made this request into a module. It works great: http://drupal.org/project/nodereference_url