Entity Reference on multilingual sites

Question

I am having a problem with getting Entity Reference to behave with a multilingual Drupal 7 installation using field translation (Entity Translation).

I have a node called 'Features' which has a bunch of dummy content entered in the default English and also in French. I have another node called 'Products' with an Entity Reference field in it for selecting the features.

So far so good, on the English form I see what I expect; I can select some of the references and save out.

When I create a French translation though, I see the following form:

I don't see any of the entities when creating or editing a French translation. Now, this in itself isn't a problem (for me) because the same selections should be made across all translations, but when I go ahead and save the French version, it will deselect all of the references in the English version of the node too.

Might I be missing something obvious with this? Is this expected behavior?

Answer 1

While this doesn't answer the behavior of the Entity Reference fields over different languages, switching the entity selection mode to a view seems to have solved it.

As suggested by Lester, I'm still unsure if the default 'Simple' selection mode was taking issue with the title of my fields, although rather than using the Title module - which can trip up other modules, i have found - I tend to keep the old title field and label it 'Administrative title' while adding a separate 'Translatable title' to work with - so in that sense there shouldn't have been an issue with the 'Simple' selection method.

Either way, setting up an Entity Reference View which displays and searches the 'Translatable title' of my Features node seems to have worked!

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EDIT:

@Dan - these labels, are they node titles or fields which you created?

The issue with standard node titles is that they are different from other fields and as such are not 'entities' - this means that entity translation will not work on them. The workaround is to either use the Title module to replace the default title field with an entity (I had some issues with this), or use a different field which you create yourself.

Once the field you need to translate is an 'entity' (basically an field you create yourself, or one generated by the Title module) you can enable translation for it when adding the field to a content type.

Next you need to create a new view containing whatever content you want to use and click the + button to add an 'entity reference view'. After configuring this view with the fields you want to display and saving you should find that when editing the Entity Reference field in your content type, you can change the Entity selection mode to Views and select your newly created view.

I hope that makes sense!

Answer 2

If you have enabled the i18n_taxonomy module disable it.

The problem is i18n_taxonomy tries to fill the available options, but no options are available by the i18n point of view because the use of two modules for transaltion.

So, again, disable i18n_taxonomy, or go ahead with this module and disable entity translation for taxonomy terms.

I've just come across exactly your behavior and at least, in my case was for having this two modules enabled.