Ability to Use More Than 3 References in a Collection

While playing with CMS, i found that there is a limitation for only 3 references in a collection. For my goals it is not enough. Would be great, if you can add more.

Or, alternatively, a possibility for adding a list of possible values for text fields. While i use collections to be able to add drop lists with simple “yes, no”, “male, female” etc.

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This is definitely a must. Gotta have this. Not really sure why we can’t have more than 3 for now.

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Hi @tephnyt - would like to hear more about your use case. What sort of collection are you building that necessitates more than 3 references? Thanks for the feedback!

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Hi @brryant,

Here is an example. I have a kennel website. There are Dogs, Litters, Parents, Events, Photos and Videos collections.

Collection Dogs:

  • Name of a dog
  • Reg.No.
  • Parents - ref to Parents (separate collection to avoid self reference and to save 1 reference)
  • Photos - mult. ref to Photos
  • Videos - mult. ref to Videos

3 references are gone…

But i’d like to add also fields for physical appearance Sex and Color. These are predefined list of possible values. It is possible to overcome the restriction of 3 references by writing in a help text a list of possible values.

Or for example collection Events:

Name
Date
Featured dogs - mult. ref to Dogs
Featured litter - ref to Litters
Photos - mult. ref to Photos

Again - i can’t add Videos reference

@tephnyt We’ll be adding a “Dropdown Field” soon where you can set predefined values. That should help!

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@tephnyt - can you explain a bit more why you’re creating a collection for Photos and Videos? Are these photos and videos that may also be attached to your other collections, not just the “Dogs” collection?

If you can, I’d create your fields like so:

Collection Dogs:

Name of a dog (Text)
Reg.No. (Text)
Parents - ref to Parents (separate collection to avoid self reference and to save 1 reference)
Photo 1 - (Image)
Photo 2 - (Image)
Photo 3 - (Image)
Photo 4 - (Image)
Video 1 - (Video)
Video 2 - (Video)
Video 3 - (Video)
Video 4 - (Video)

Granted, this isn’t as flexible, but it should do the trick until we add “Image Set” as a field.

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I also need more than 3 references in a collection:

  1. Category
  2. Author Profile Picture
  3. Author Name
  4. Author Short Bio

I could use a few more too, but these are absolutely necessary. If I could, I would like to add:

  • Author Title
  • Author Email Address
  • Author Twitter
  • Author Facebook
  • Author LinkedIn
  • View author profile

@brryant - There are workarounds, sure!

Just adding photos and videos would not work for me. I did collection for Photos with

photo - photo
title - text
description - rich text
dog - mult ref
litter - ref
event - ref

And hoping to pull the right photos by filtering by dog ref for dog’s page. Didn’t try it yet. But should work.

Found this thread … dropdown field useful here too :grinning: thanks!

I need more than 3 references in the collection OR a multi-reference that I can actually refers to outside of a collection page.

I am not using a collection page at the moment as it is getting hard to use due limitation of widgets use and customisation of each page in the collection like adding/deleting fields that aren’t dynamic. I am creating individual page for each collection items.

Each of my page have its unique dynamic list of another collection. This should have been easy but the items in this collection can be repeating in different pages. To overcome this I had to create many switches. It is ok for now since the ref collection list is still small but it is getting bigger and I need a better solution… Really do hope that the multi-referencing is working.

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It seems you’re structuring your collection incorrectly. All you need is an “Author” collection with all these fields (fields for profile picture, name, short bio). When you reference the “Author” collection you have access to All Fields in that collection. Does that make sense?

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@brryant

I hadn’t even stumbled upon this issue when I noticed this thread but I’m currently building a content website which has the following collections:

  • Posts (Regular articles, with title, tagline, rich text, imgs and possible video)

  • Publications (A broader way to find content, like magazines organized thematically to which the posts will be referenced)

  • Authors or content curators (Name, Bio, Profile Pic, etc.)

  • Documentaries (Each publication will reference a few documentaries so that’s still another database we’d like to create a separate template page for)

  • Content Tags (like categories, both posts and publications would be referenced by tags like “Environment”, “Tech”, or whatever…)

  • Agents (Like posts, or authors, but for when you’re writing a post about an organization, say one publication decides that besides writing articles about crowdfunding, it wants to list the most famous crowdfunding agents - kickstarter, indiegogo… - and another one would be writing articles about the environment and want to list important agents - greenpeace, wwf… - it would be awesome to be able to then browse all agents, all documentaries, documentaries tagged with “environment”, agents mentioned in such and such publications and so on, do you see where I’m going with this? We’d have a few invited authors writing publications about a few subjects, that would be at the same time, slowly building a neat interchangeable database of articles, documentaries, agents, authors, etc…

Does that make sense? Am I doing this wrong? If I add documentaries as posts the template page looks really weird for them and If I leave out publications or tags, or agents, then it’s really not the website I was creating anymore that you would have a list of posts, a list of publications, a list of agents and a list of tags or categories or subjects or whatever…

I’m just starting to work on this project now, so if you say that this is a feature you will be adding soon, I’d be very happy to hear that… :slight_smile:

Thanks guys!

I have that part down. :smile:
I can’t remember why now I wrote that. I just went into the blog post template and I can add more than 3 references, so I must have been confused at the moment.

Not sure what you mean by this. You mean more than 3 fields (since there’s still a limit on references)?

Yes fields not references. I should have said I realized I can bind elements to content from several different collections.

I see now how I was originally not understanding the proper way to build out collection fields. I was still figuring out how to use dynamic content within a collection template. Originally I was thinking that I needed to add a reference field to the blog post collection in order unlock the ability to pull in multiple pieces of content from the author collection. Now I see that if I have just one reference field linking the author collection to the blog post, I can pull in multiple pieces of content from both collections within the blog post template.

Haha I’m sure that doesn’t clear anything up. But my original concern is now resolved, and I have a better understanding of the proper way to use the CMS.

I’ve got the need for this as well. My use case is an enterprise software webinars collection. The webinars should ideally be linked to all of these other collections:

  • Relevant Solution(s)
  • Relevant Workforce(s)
  • Relevant Customer(s)
  • Speaker(s)
  • Category
  • Quotes

does this mean that what I want to do is currently possible? now I got confused, and I haven’t gotten there yet…

@tomjohn and @AlanBorger Do all of your collections need to have have their own detail pages? If not then it might make sense to make some of these just fields in the collection for now.

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Thanks a lot for getting back at me @thesergie

I can try. But the short answer would be yes, they do…

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Yes, they do need to all have their own category, but having their own page is not as important. For example, we have solution pages that refer to quotes, webinars, workforces, videos, ebooks, case studies, etc.

I could enter all of those fields manually for now, but it will be much more powerful if I could update all of my quotes, for example, in one fell swoop instead of going to all of the pages that reference it, or if I can swap out the picture of an employee who’s also a speaker in a webinar, the author of an ebook, the quote in a case study, and gives a testimonial in a video by just going to one location.

I can do some of this right now, but I’m limited to choosing what things are most important to link across the board, and I’m not looking at collections as things that necessarily need their own page, but rather as collections of things that can be referenced and changed globally.

Hope that makes sense.

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