Exporting from Field Collections and Importing to New Content Type

Question

So here's a high-level overview of the situation: we're running into a lot of issues with the field collections module, but a lot of content has already been created for a content type that uses two fields within a field collection. We've tried to overcome some of the problems we're experiencing with field collections, and at this point it's been over a month, so we're just going to have to give up on field collection for this project.

So here's what we have. A content type like this:

• Title Field
• Field Collection field containing:
  • Subtitle Field
  • Body Field

And we want to export from that and create nodes in a content type that looks like this:

• Title Field
• Subtitle Field
• Body Field

I don't really need past revisions or anything like that. I'm just looking for advice about how best to accomplish this.

Answer 1

Some time ago I did something similar, but with normal fields. I used Views Bulk Operations.

First I've created a view which listed all the nodes of the particular node type and added the VBO checkbox to execute arbitrary PHP code.

On the view's page I've checked all the nodes and pasted in the PHP textbox the code which updated field B values based on the field A values. In your case you should create a new node based on the field collection.

Finally, when VBO finished executing the code for all my nodes, I went to the content type fields page and deleted field A (in you case the field collection).

Done!

Answer 2

After creating your new content type you can try to use either Rules, Feeds or the Migrate module to move the existing content into new nodes.

I've successfully used the Migrate module to create Field Collections for example (and update a node with Field Collections). I know the other 2 approaches are doable too. Unfortunately, I dont have any simple code examples to share with you.