Support using same mapping target multiple times

Subscribe. In theory this definitely works. But are people really targeting multiple times?

What do you think about this approach? It assumes that target items are nodes (or at least objects where the target element is $target_item->$mapping['target']). To work with #753426: Partial update of nodes I removed all of the changes to the mappers from that patch.

All tests passed.

Tested with the unchanged filefield.inc mapper and it worked as expected (overwrote the file field instead of adding multiple photos)

@alex_b - #8

But in #6 we are clearing out the fields after the call to map() but before any mapping is actually done. So all the fields are cleared out initially and then aren't cleared out for the whole duration the mapping is occurring, so targets/subtargets can be aggregated throughout the loop.

So I think #6 works unless you are talking about saving state across multiple map() calls in which case I don't understand why the $state approach in #4 would work.

Got it...will keep thinking on a solution

This patch builds on #6 but allows a new optional 'target_key' property which will allow mappers that created subtargets to specify the actual target_key since there is no way of knowing it otherwise. I stepped through the mapping of a link field and it seemed to work fine.

All tests passed

Improving the patch to meet the requirements of comment #13.

All tests passed except 8 from "Defaults: fast feed" but I think that might have been from unrelated changes?

Turns out it was me that broke the fast feed tests. The fact that we were unsetting timestamp before mapping broke the processor. I changed the setting of the timestamp after map had run and everything works. I looked through the current processors and this problem should not occur elsewhere.

Now all tests are passing

BWPanda, that is the intention of the feature. Are you sure your CCK field is a multiple value field (set in the field configuration settings)

The ability to add multiple items to a multi value field is the intention. If you can, you should look in mappers/content.inc to see exactly what's happening. Would help to debug if you open a new issue and post a feed example, mapper config and content type export.

I'm trying to map multiple sources to a multi-value CCK field...and also thought that #20 was about the same. The new issue in #25 deals with taxonomy, so is not the same. Apologies if there's a more appropriate issue, if so, pls point it out.

I've tried this with beta-10 and DEV, but all that gets saved is the last mapped item, as reported above.

I've attached content type and feed config as a feature, as well as the CSV file. I'm happy to investigate this myself in more detail as soon as I've confirmed that I'm not missing something obvious.

I've found more hints that this should just work, except it doesn't.

http://drupal.org/node/860748#comment-3258186 (see follow up comments)

This is probably way too simplistic, but currently this works for me with initial tests of multi-value text fields...

Change:

function content_feeds_set_target($node, $target, $value) {

  $field = isset($node->$target) ? $node->$target : array();

  // Handle multiple value fields.
  if (is_array($value)) {
    $i = 0;
    foreach ($value as $v) {
      if (!is_array($v) && !is_object($v)) {
        $field[$i]['value'] = $v;
      }
      $i++;
    }
  }
  else {
    $field[0]['value'] = $value;
  }

  $node->$target = $field;
}

to

function content_feeds_set_target($node, $target, $value) {
  $field = isset($node->$target) ? $node->$target : array();
  $field[]['value'] = $value;
  $node->$target = $field;
}

I tryed all that I can to do this..i mapped
xpathparser:128 Extras Text
as a Parse XML using XPath.
On the view from drupal 1 that do the xml feed I add field extra and selected Group multiple values ( 2 start from 0 ). But when I go to the XMLfeed it show

<extra_txt>
<div class="field-item field-item-0">text 0</div><div class="field-item field-item-1">text 1</div>,
</extra_txt>

The most wierd is that Images with multyple values work fine.
I need help to solve this, or I will need to change alot on the website and separate and limit the text fields. (probably since I can't understand what is doind those divs,, maybe it's something about $view->style plugin->rendered )

I've spent a few hours on this, both yesterday and this morning, before adding my two cents.
I wanted to be sure I had followed the updates of this version, and checked the patches to ensure I wasn't missing something.
So, here's where I'm at.

After downloading -beta10, and configuring a simple CSV source with multiple source fields for one single multi-value CCK field, I was also unable to get multiple values populated.

As suggested in #23, I added some debugging to the /mappers/content.inc file to review what was happening.
I came to the same conclusion as Nicolas in #30. Altering the code in a similar fashion gave me the desired results.

Questions, specific to the content_feeds_set_target() method (as in #30):
1) $value is the string from the source feed, when would it be an array?
2) more importantly, it is the $field value that we wish to identify as a multi-dimensional array

So, as a follow up, is there ever a case where $value WOULD be an array, that I (we) are missing?

Otherwise, I think this update is appropriate.

Like Ben, I still think I'm missing something and have the same questions, but here's a patch FWIW. I've been running this successfully in production sites, but it has the potential to break things that I may not be using.

I wonder if you wouldn't mind telling me how you are formatting your csv file for multi values?

I tried your patch with the following CSV with Node Processor settings set to Update existing nodes:

nid, my_cck_field
1,value_1
1,value_2

When I import, value 2 still overwrites value 1.

(FWIW, I'm using multi checkboxes)

The multiple values must be *per item*, like this:

nid, my_cck_field, my_other_field
1,value_1,other_value_1
2,value_2,other_value_2

I guess the overwriting behaviour in your example should be as it is, since you could otherwise never update any nodes. Also, not sure whether this was your intention, but mapping to a node id would be bad...I used that as the GUID set to unique.

I've attached my test importer for this as well for reference.

Oh, and I haven't really looked at checkboxes yet....this is for a plain text field...