I have run the relationship migration on one of our sites, and there now seems to be a problem. We were using relationship to assign authors (post type 'people') to different kinds of content ('articles', 'publications', 'videos' etc.). Under the old structure there was the intermediate post type 'authorships') that managed these relationships.
However, the migrated relationships we now have a one:many relationship for each post type and a single one:many relationship for people.
In the back end of the post type the new temporary post type appears and I can't assign people as before. However, in the front end the existing assigned authors are still displaying correctly.
I think the best thing would be if you could provide me with a copy of the site pre-migration that I can use as a starting point and go through the migration process myself.
Can you provide such a duplicate?
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I'll mark your next reply as private for you to share the URL if available.
Hi Nigel - sorry, we're using Updraft Plus instead of Duplicator - but if you uncompress those zip files it's extremely straightforward - it's just the database and the plugin folders, together with any extra files needed to get the site up. If you re-install the database you'll have everything you need.
I tried importing the database to a fresh site after doing a text replace for the table prefix but the import failed. I've tried a couple of times with different errors each time. I'll try again tomorrow.
I'm still unable to complete importing the sql file to recreate the database.
Could I get credentials for your site, it will be much quicker for me to install a plugin to take a snapshot and it will avoid me introducing any inconsistencies between your version of the site and a version that I manually reconstruct.
I installed a copy and examined the relationships and I can see why merging them is not—and will not be—possible.
You were using one post type to act as an intermediary post type for several different relationships when you set this up.
So authorships is the intermediate post type for the people-articles relationship, and the people-publications relationship, and... etc.
In Types 3 M2M relationships cannot share the same intermediate post type, each relationship requires a unique intermediate post type where relevant.
You can see this if you edit your relationships and you deactivate all but the people-authorship and article-authorship relationships (go as if to delete them and you'll see an option to de-activate them instead).
With just those two relationships active you *can* then merge them. But you would then need to manually create new people-videos etc. relationships, and there is no mechanism for then automatically migrating the data.
If you want to migrate to Types 3 relationships, identify which relationship you should merge to save you the most amount of data you'll have to fix.
You would need to write a script to manually migrate the relationship data yourself.
Ignore the existing (migrated) relationships for a moment.
Make new relationships as required, so an M2M relationship between people and articles, an M2M relationship between people and publications, etc.
Write a script to loop through the people posts and for each one get the related authorship posts and for each of those get the related articles and use toolset_connect_posts to make a connection using the new people - articles relationship, get the related publications and use toolset_connect_posts to make a connection using the new people - publications relationship, etc.
Once you've run that (the code snippets feature at Toolset > Settings > Custom Code helpfully lets you run code one time only) then you can delete the old migrated relationships and then make any changes to the forms or Views that use data from related posts so that they operate with the new relationships.
