Content Types: Slaving and Chaining - Possible?

I'm working on a fairly complex project, so my apologies in advance if this question is convoluted.

The project is nicknamed "FLEXIfiction". As the name suggests, I am using Flexi to develop an online fiction library where members can post stories. So far, it's falling into place surprisingly well.

The trick of course is the story/chapter relationship. A story of course consists of chapters (from 1 to X, with X being unlimited). A story has a one-to-many relationship with chapters, whereas a chapter of course has a one-to-one relationship to a story.

That is, a chapter is bound to a story. In turn, the story is linked or chained to one or more chapters.

Hence my question.

Currently, I am using a plugin and field ids (along with a special functions) to enforce the story/chapter relationship. Basically, in the plugin I manually enter in the special field Ids and the code enforces the relationships.

However, I am wondering, is there a better method for doing this?

For example, a content type essentially is a container of fields. The problem with a Story is that the Chapter itself is a content type - you cannot just make a chapter a field as each chapter has its own title, author, etc.

Enforcing content type and field master/slave relationship is easy. But... what do you do when you have an actual content type that itself is logically supposed to be slaved?

I do have something that is workable, but the methodology is so removed from what humans understand this type of construct to be. A chapter belongs in a story - but I cannot do that because I cannot force a content type into another one.

Or can I? Is slaving/chaining possible at the content type level?

Hello, using
Select Flexi Item
and
Select Flexi Item - Reverse

From:
www.sitefaitbienfait.fr/en/downl ... ns-joomla/

is not enough ?

I hadn't seen these before, believe it or not. I will give these a try and see if this helps. Thanks!

Many ideas and some code of the NEW related items field come from the author of these fields.

More over he has kindly offered to merge the related item field with select FLEXIcontent items field and also make a reverse of the NEW related items field.

You can use these fields, like this:

1. Create a new select FLEXIcontent items field and assign it to type story. Enable on this field the multiple selection parameter
2. Create a new select FLEXIcontent items Reverse field and assign it to type chapters. Set this field the reverse the above field.

Regards

I did the experimenting. Unfortunately, this wasn't quite what I needed. I wrote a field plugin that is specific to chaining chapters their specific stories, and so far that works well.

In a perfect world, I'd be able to store chapters in a separate data table from their stories for better hierarchical enforcement, but this will do for now.