Cannot add referenced entities that have commas or double quotes in title. Field widget autocomplete (tag style)

Hi @thoughmas,

Just try your issue without entityconect and I'm able to reproduce it.
I think it's more a bug on Entity Reference Autocomplete widget itself so I'm moving the issue into Entity Reference project.

I am also getting this issue with entity reference on it's own.

The issue I'm experiencing is that the first referenced item gets double quotes round it, then when the second reference is added, the quotes get removed.

If the referenced title is surrounded by double quotes, it works. So, you can add the quotes in manually.

The issue is still there though.

It seems that somewhere in the javascript the quotes are removed for the prior entries when a new one is added. I can't find the place. I have names in the node titles like name, given name. So I go crazy. select lists are not really an option with 10.000+ entries :-(

Help would be appreciated.

Cheers
Alex

I've run into this issue and have tracked it down to jQuery.form.js and Drupal's ajax.js. This happens to me on non-tag entityrefrence_autocomplete field types, but only when the form is a "multipart" form. The reason this is happening is because of these lines:
http://drupalcode.org/project/drupal.git/blob/dc791ec5839b52c7616bf66993...

// The triggering element is about to be disabled (see below), but if it
// contains a value (e.g., a checkbox, textfield, select, etc.), ensure that
// value is included in the submission. As per above, submissions that use
// $.ajax() are already serialized prior to the element being disabled, so
// this is only needed for IFRAME submissions.
var v = $.fieldValue(this.element);
if (v !== null) {
  options.extraData[this.element.name] = v;
}

When a comma is in the entity Title, "v" above can have a value like this :

v === '"1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC (1600)"';

http://drupalcode.org/project/jquery_update.git/blob/baff5d15a438cfa8216...

    if (options.iframe !== false && (fileInputs || options.iframe || multipart)) {
            // hack to fix Safari hang (thanks to Tim Molendijk for this)
            // see:  http://groups.google.com/group/jquery-dev/browse_thread/thread/36395b7ab510dd5d
            if (options.closeKeepAlive) {
                    $.get(options.closeKeepAlive, fileUpload);
                 }
            else {
                    fileUpload();
                 }
    }
    else {
                 $.ajax(options);
    }

The fileUpload() function will be called for multipart forms instead of $.ajax(options) which does not cause this issue.

http://drupalcode.org/project/jquery_update.git/blob/baff5d15a438cfa8216...

                         // add "extra" data to form if provided in options
                         var extraInputs = [];
                         try {
                                 if (s.extraData) {
                                         for (var n in s.extraData) {
                                                 extraInputs.push(
                                                         $('<input type="hidden" name="'+n+'" value="'+s.extraData[n]+'" />')
                                                                 .appendTo(form)[0]);
                                         }
                                 }

                                 // add iframe to doc and submit the form
                                 $io.appendTo('body');
                 io.attachEvent ? io.attachEvent('onload', cb) : io.addEventListener('load', cb, false);
                                 form.submit();
                         }

This will generate a hidden input form field like this:

<input type="hidden" (1600)""="" DC="" Washington,="" NW="" Ave="" Pennsylvania ="" 1600="" value="" name="field_entityref_test[und][form][entity_id][target_id]">

Note that the value is empty. When this form is POSTed, the $_POST value for the target_id will be empty and no reference will be created.

This issues is caused by using double quotes around an entity title when there's a comma in it. If we use single quotes instead, the issue goes away.

See the attached patch.

@thoughmas

Sorry about that. Try this patch, it should work.

I'm not sure why SimpleTest can't seem to apply this patch. Trying again.

SimpleTest fails because it can't apply the patch with git. I can apply the patch just fine here.

It should stay with single quotes. That fixes the ajax submit issue.

The switch back to double quotes in _entityreference_autocomplete_tags_validate() is to get drupal_explode_tags($tags) to work correctly. It expects double quotes around strings with commas and will split them up correctly.

This problem also occurs with entities that have double quotes in their title, such as '12" vinyl'. I'm afraid that a solution that replaces quotes will not be sufficient to solve this case as well.

@pfrenssen
I thought this might happen.

I think the root cause of the problem here is pushing the target_id number into the autocomplete search field. There is no telling what will be in the title of a related entity. The current approach is just not fixable.

I propose that the entityreference auto complete field move this target_id number to a second, separate, hidden field. When you do an autocomplete search, the entity title is returned along with this second field. Some javascript code would then parse the response and put the title into the search text field and the target_id into the hidden field. The form submit handler would then pull the target_id from the hidden field. No need to parse the title to find the target_id.

any news on this? would be nice to use the module... but i can't loose my commas

I'm seeing this same problem using version 7.x-1.1.

This patch in #12 seems to resolve commas, but quotes are still problematic.

When a second selection is added, Dwayne "The Rock" (1) changes to Dwayne.

In my testing, the simple fix over at #2576749: Autocomplete multivalue coma fix resolves both commas and quotes. The terms are added successfully on save, although the display is not necessarily ideal:

"apple ""banana"" (1)", orange (2)

Not sure how important that is.