Term with multiple parents breaks HS

Could you please make a screencast of the problem being reproduced. That makes it easier for me to understand the problem. Thanks!

P.S.: don't have any screencast software yet? On Windows and Mac OS X, you can use the free Jing.

Could you please make a screencast of the problem being reproduced. That makes it easier for me to understand the problem. Thanks!

P.S.: don't have any screencast software yet? On Windows and Mac OS X, you can use the free Jing.

Hello Wim Leers,

I am also experiencing this problem and would like to help to get it resolved.
Hierarchical Select is such a great module and I really want to be able to use it on my website.

Please refer to the 1min34sec screencast below that shows the issue.
http://www.screencast.com/users/trupal218/folders/Jing/media/f1f13a59-b1...

Please let me know if any further info is required.

Thanks trupal218, I'll investigate this bug in February (currently in the middle of my exam period)!

Awesome, thanks Wim Leers. Anymore information I can provide to help please let me know.
Good luck on your exams! =)

hey Wim Leers,

here is another screencast (jingproject is very cool!)
http://www.screencast.com/users/trupal218/folders/Jing/media/0d0ffd56-45...

Added one more parent 'D' and the term '2' is located under 'B' 'C' and 'D'
You can see the weird breaking of HS when term '2' is selected at anytime.

Hope this helps you to get to the root of the problem.

Thanks in advance!

Thanks :) Much appreciated!

subscribing - experiencing the same issue and looking forward to a fix. thanks Wim Leers!

I wanted to report this a few weeks ago, but was busy with the rest of the site. You guys got here before I did ;)

Experiencing the same issue. It happens with 'children' items set to have more than one parent and also with 'grand-children' (nice way I came up to call sub-items) set to also belong to multiple parents and/or children.

I also use the taxonomy manager as shown on the screencasts to set hierarchy (don't know if this matters though) and I have enabled the 'Save term lineage' option in order to have a node that gets tagged with one term also inherit tags from all related parents.

So, Wim I too wish you good luck with your exams and can't wait for this to get fixed once you have the time. Thanx in advance.

Im using a pretty complex hierarchy in my taxonomy vocabulary and all the terms with 2 or more parents are ending up with this issue. HS is very cool and I really want to use it on my site. Thanks!

Thank You!

Hi Wim Leers,

May I kindly ask if you will have time in the near future to look into this issue?
Being able to use HS will be very helpful for this site I am currently building.

Your help will be very much appreciated!

Regards

HS doesn't support multiple parent hierarchies atm.
#476656: Limitations of lineages and dropbox with multiple parent hierarchies
#492068: Change HS API to support lineage storage provided by implementations

I understand now that this is not an HS issue anymore and that we must wait until another module adds support for multiple parents per term.

The question is though... Is there such a request someplace? Does this need to be done in core Taxonomy? My point is that apparently there is popular demand (my opinion) but if no one knows about it, it will never get implemented. So, where should we turn to? Is there an issue queue for core modules?

@klonos
This issue is related to HS and modules that integrate with it. Read #492068: Change HS API to support lineage storage provided by implementations

Wim Leers kindly replied to my email and said he will be looking at fixing this issue in the next 2-3 weeks.
If anyone else can begin to look into this at #492068: Change HS API to support lineage storage provided by implementations it would be very much appreciated!

Yes crea, I know. I've already taken a look at that issue, but this is where the issue you mention is left:

'...once there is module supporting storing lineages, HS will need modification too, since HS will still calculate lineage old way and get wrong results displayed in dropbox.'

So I take it we are waiting for some other module that supports storing lineages. Is there some work being done? Are you referring to a specific module or talking in general? I think the second. SO...

Where should we post a feature request for such support? Does it need to be done in core (perhaps core Taxonomy) or should there be a completely new module? Both of these I think will take a looong time :(

@klonos
There needs to happen HS API change first. Then modules that integrate with HS like Content Taxonomy can extend their HS hooks to support multiple parents, or it can be done in separate helper modules. There's nothing really to discuss yet without change in the API.

I've reproduced the problem.

This use case *is* supported. HS doesn't support *remembering* (i.e. storing) individual lineages when the dropbox is enabled. It does support browsing them in all cases.
It does support storing a *single* lineage with terms that have multiple parents (this is the case where the dropbox is disabled). Everything will work as expected
It does support storing *multiple* lineages with terms that have multiple parents (this is the case where the dropbox is enabled). However, suppose you have terms like these:

   A -> C
   A -> D
   B -> C
   B -> D

When you save any two lineages that contain all four terms, all four lineages will be rendered by HS, because it tries to relate all combinations of terms (given only 4 term ids, it has to resurrect the original lineages, because that's all that Drupal core's Taxonomy stores), and the 4 terms are related to each other in 4 different ways (instead of 2 when single parents would be used).

The solution is simple: enable the save_lineage setting. You may want to set the operator to "is one of" in this case, to allow for partial matches (this would be necessary when you did not enable save_lineage for associating terms with nodes).

What crea is referring to, is a more final solution, that would not exhibit the strange case of getting 4 lineages rendered by HS while you only selected 2 lineages. For that, it's necessary to store lineage metadata instead of just the terms.
So this is in fact not a duplicate. It's related, but not a duplicate. It's only related because neither rburgundy, trupal218 nor klonos mention using the dropbox, hence they cannot be experiencing this limitation. They simply haven't enabled the save_lineage setting yet! :)

I'm pretty sure this analysis is correct, but please correct me if I'm wrong.

@Wim:
Did you watch screencast by trupal218 ? There is no dropbox, but still HS totally freaks out by showing 4 levels on 2-level hierarchy . Ok, maybe that is not duplicate of #492068: Change HS API to support lineage storage provided by implementations, but it still somewhat related to the multiple parents problem.

@crea: definitely, I watched both screencasts! :) I'm 99% sure that he doesn't have save_lineage enabled, and that's what I recommend as the solution.
I can reproduce exactly what he is getting when I have save_lineage disabled. When I enable save_lineage, the problem goes away.

And you're absolutely right, it's related, but I didn't deny that, did I? I said exactly that!

I too have:
save_lineage -> enabled
dropbox -> disabled.

My use case scenario is a bit more complicated than your example (but then again I realize you only meant to give an example):

A -> B -> C
A -> B -> D
B -> C
B -> D

You see, in my case I need to expose term B and its children both as a sub-category of term A and as a category of its own. When I select A -> B -> C, instead of having 3 drop-down menus in a row displaying A, B and C I get 3 drop-downs of B, 'empty' and C

Wait... I think I might have nailed this one by trying to explain the situation!... give me some time to realize...

Ok, please everyone go to ../admin/settings/hierarchical_select/configs and double-check for every Hierarchy type/Hierarchy whether you have the same save_lineage setting or not.

In my case, I had a Context type form field, an exposed Views filter and a Context type form. Two of them had save_lineage enabled, but one had it disabled (can't remember which one cause once I saw it, I enabled it). After enabling it in all three, the issue went away.

Don't know if this helps you people. Let me know if it was the same thing for you.

If more information is needed I'll be more than happy to provide.

Told you so! :P :)

Glad this is fixed now :)

Then this is a 'support request' rather than 'bug report', or...

Perhaps if HS actually needs all 'instances' of a widget to have the same settings across forms, views etc in order to not behave this way, then:

- either you need to make sure it does, so... not 'Fixed'.*
- or if this limits the user options, it needs to be addressed in order to accept different settings across forms, views etc. Again, not 'Fixed'.

What do you think(?)

* btw, if this is the case and you take care of it, you'll have less support requests about this issue in the future. If it happened to us, it will happen to others at some time and you know how people love to start a new issue then search for an existing one before they do ;)

It doesn't *always* need to have the same settings … otherwise I'd have indeed made it that way. It's only in certain cases that it's required to have the same settings. I know this is not clear and sucks usability-wise, but making this more user friendly requires *a very big* amount of code, so that's not going to happen, realistically speaking.
Also, there are so few people using multiple parents that it's really not worth it. I've updated the README to warn people about this: http://drupal.org/cvs?commit=335248.

I meant to reply to this, but somehow it got buried in my to-do list...

@Wim Leers: Thank you for the readme update. I understand that it's not worth the pain. I hope it won't come back to bite us at a latter point in time :S