Child categories don't show in the dropdown...when there are not in the same container..normal?

Hi there,

I'm building a quite complicated category structure for a new travel site i'm building and I have a problem.

I would like to use active select to let people filter by continent>country>categories (too add nodes to a book like structure).

That part alone actually works fine, if all the country categories are all stored in the same container for every country and then are associated to the right country with the distant parent.

So it is for example : europe>france>paris (paris being a category that nodes can be assigned to).

If for example I add monmartre (which is a child category of Paris) I can add it in the same CATEGORIES container and then give Paris as it,s distant parent and it works fine.

Adding child categories to categories in the CATEGORY container makes those categories available in the dropdown on the add node page.

For example user could select europe, then france, and the by selecting the CATEGORY dropdown he would see:

Paris
--Montmartre

Which is actually already quite good.

now here comes my problem

I want users not only to assign nodes, but to create categories as well in the country structures.

This means that a user should be able to insert categories in the already existing structure for a country.

THE PROBLEM is that when a user gets the dropdown menu to insert his category in the structure he gets access to all the countries and all the subcats of every country because they are all in the same container. This creates of course very non user friendly book-like dropdown and I don,t want it.

SOLUTION:

I tried the following:

1)create a container categories that would appear on the nodes to be assigned on categories. That container would contain ONE category per country.(the country name for example)

2)create a container for every country that would contain the categories for that country. The categories themselves are ATTACHED to the category COUNTRY in the general CATEGORIES container that I just created.

That would permit someone to create a category, then select the container for the country he wants and then only see the categories for that country and not for all countries.

That is because when someone creates a category he can choose the container he wants, thus the country container that contains the categories of that country!!!!!

That is effectively a good solution to the ugly gigantic book-like dropdown.

BUT!!!!!!!!!

having the country category and it's location categories in two separate containers seems to break the last category selector in the node creation form.

Normally I would think that in the dropdown it could show a category and it's childs EVEN IF THE CHILDS ARE NOT IN THE SAME CONTAINER but ... it seems not, which is not really convenient to create the ultimate book (without ugly dropdown).

So if I want categories for a country to show in the dropdown on the node creation page (in the categories dropdown) I have to put all categories in the same container. But puttign them all in the same container like that makes it that when a user WANTS TO ADD A NEW CATEGORY he cannot browse by country and has to insert it,s category in a dropdown that shows all countries and categories at the same place.

So it,s working active select OR working BY COUNTRY category insertion. But it seems you can't have it both ways!!!

An easy way to have it both ways is to make appear assigned categories of a category in the dropdown even if the assigned categories are not in the same container than the parent one!!!

Is that possible? How to solve this problem?? Is there a solution you're thinking of??

Thanks and sorry for the complkicated post, if you need clarifications, please ask.

Patchak