Hello, it sounds like you need a way to create relationships between posts in the same custom post type - Dogs. Unfortunately Toolset's post relationships are not currently able to connect posts from the same custom post type, so Toolset's post relationships don't apply in this scenario.
Wordpress also offers hierarchical post types, like Pages, in which each post can belong to one parent Page hierarchically, and have an unlimited number of its own children. But that doesn't really help in this situation either, because you need the ability to have two parents of the same post - the sire and the dam.
Furthermore, when creating a post, you would like to offer your Users the ability to choose sire and dam individually from dropdown lists of all Dogs, filtered by sex, and possibly offer the ability to start typing in a text input to filter those gender-specific lists of Dogs by name (i.e. the Dog post title). The only type of input in Forms that offers this select/typeahead functionality is the Post Relationship field. However, as we've already mentioned, you cannot connect multiple posts from the same post type in Toolset's Post Relationships.
So realistically speaking, this isn't something you will be able to accomplish easily in Toolset exactly as you've described. Probably the most effective workaround in the current software is to include two custom fields on every Dog post - one for sire and another for dam. That custom field will store a numeric ID representing the sire Dog post or the dam Dog post, respectively. In wp-admin, the field would only show a numeric value, like 123. This makes management in wp-admin a bit more difficult, since you would need to know the post ID of the sire or dam Dog post to set the field value manually.
In the Form to create or edit a Dog post, you will include two generic select fields - one for selecting the Sire and another for selecting the Dam. You can use Views to generate the options for these select fields dynamically, showing the Dog post title to the User but capturing the post ID for the database. I can show you examples of this if you'd like. However, these select fields are not true post relationship fields, and do not provide the functionality that allows you to start typing to filter the list. That feature is not available for custom field management, and requires custom code.
With this generic field setup, you would establish the hierarchical relationships between each dog and its direct parent dog posts by storing the related post IDs in custom fields. For consistency throughout the site, it seems you would not establish relationships beyond the parents directly in the child post Form. It seems that those relationships would be inherited from the parent Dog posts. In other words, the grandparent Dogs of a child Dog are not maintained or managed directly in the child Dog post, they are inherited from the sire and dam fields of the parent Dog posts, which in turn inherit their grandparents from their parents, and so on and so on, as far back as records are maintained.
Otherwise, you need a much more complex management system, where multi-generational hierarchical relationships must be established arbitrarily in each Dog post, and the relationships set and maintained in ancestor posts may or may not directly influence the relationships in the current post.
Your thoughts?
