[Resolved] Unable to relate posts of the same type?

[Author]

Posts

[logicelf]

I am trying to:
Set a relationship between CPTs of the same type, as I can do with other CPT/CF solutions

I expected to see:
A way to do this.

Instead, I got:
Nothing in the docs, and forum entries stating this is not possible. One forum entry by Christian explains a workaround using a flat taxonomy, which is obviously (no offence to Christian, obviously) a bit of a kludge:

https://toolset.com/forums/topic/connecting-custom-posts-to-a-custom-post-of-the-same-type/

He mentions that this functionality is on the roadmap, but that it has been placed on hold in favour of new features.

I have to say, I'm disappointed. This strikes me as a glaring omission in basic functionality for a CPT/CF solution - it simply never occurred to me that this wasn't possible.

Can someone please provide a release date for this? I have to consider urgently whether to rebuild this project (and another) with Meta Box or ACF. If I have to do that, we may as well abandon Toolset altogether.

Thanks.

[Nigel]

Hi James

I'm sorry to confirm that this is not possible, and I can't give you any indication of when this feature will be added, as it is not currently under development.

It is on the roadmap for unscheduled "future" development.

There are a number of features from the relationships project which didn't make it into the initial release, another limitation being that you can't connect the same posts more than once.

I don't want to mislead you about when to expect this to be supported if you have important decisions to make about your projects.

I encourage you to submit a feature request using https://toolset.com/home/contact-us/suggest-a-new-feature-for-toolset/s so that the product manager is aware of the demand when prioritising development work.

[Luo Yang]

Hello,

I assume you are going to setup many-to-many relationship between posts of same post type.

If it is, you are right, there isn't such kind of built-in feature within Toolset Types plugin.

And it is on our roadmap, but I am not sure when will it be released.

However, you can add a feature request and add an vote for it:
https://toolset.com/home/contact-us/suggest-a-new-feature-for-toolset/
Above feature request form is controlled by our support manager directly.

And besides the Workaround you mentioned above, I have seen other users using some other relate posts plugin, for example, below thread:
https://toolset.com/forums/topic/using-post-reference-field-to-display-data-posts-of-the-same-post-type/#post-1196845

[logicelf]

Hi Nigel,

Thanks for your reply - but I'm afraid that submitting a feature request and hoping for the best isn't going to cut it here. This should have been included in the initial release (and at this point, its omission should be categorised as a bug and tagged as critical). Releasing a CPT solution without this is just woefully inadequate, and I can't believe I missed this when looking at solutions. I'm quite angry that I've only discovered this now - but it honestly never even occurred to me that someone would release a CPT solution without it. The fact that Toolset did so is bad enough - that they've shelved it to work on shiny new stuff is frankly inexcusable in this product space.

[logicelf]

Thanks for the follow-up, Luo.

[Nigel]

I understand what you are saying, but I'm probably not the person that needs to hear this.

Which is why I suggested you submit the request form, which goes to the product manager and is cc:ed to the lead developer and head of support.

[logicelf]

I get that, Nigel - it's no disrespect to you folks, who provide great support. I'm mainly angry with myself for not checking something I considered so basic before using Toolset for this.

Since I did, and I need to solve this quickly - I wonder if you can help with a conditional which isn't obvious to me:

I'll use WP tags for this. Creating a view to output posts where the tag is the same as the one in the loop is trivial, obviously - but I can't seem to see how to nest that view in a conditional which will fire the view only if a tag exists and the count of related posts with the same tag is > 0. I don't want "No items found' all over the place.

Am I missing something obvious?

[Nigel]

It sounds like you are doubling up, using a condition to check if a View has any results before outputting the View, which means running the query twice whenever there are any results.

The "obvious" solution is to simply delete everything inside the wpv-no-items-found shortcode so that if there are no results then nothing is output.

[logicelf]

Yup, pretty obvious. Thanks Nigel.

[Nigel]

OK, I think we can close here?

I do encourage you to submit the request.

[logicelf]

Yes, thanks Nigel.

Honestly? I've found several things which Toolset doesn't do (or does with some 'workaround') while building this project - all stuff we could solve in half a dozen lines of code against a decent API. We can't wait around for omissions like that to get fixed every time - I think we'll just build the next one with Meta Box.

Thanks for your support.