How can an entity reference field be displayed as a select list that shows the selected entity?

Question

The Problem

I have a couple of entity reference fields that references a hierarchy of nodes. For the sake of simplicity let's use just the top level example Video Game -> Video Game Release

So when I look at the video game "Assassin's Creed 2" I see two releases "Assassin's Creed 2" and "Assassin's Creed Ezio Trilogy".

Background info that isn't necessarily important to the question:

! The reason for the entity reference is on "Assassin's Creed Brotherhood" I would also have two releases "Assassin's Creed Brotherhood" and "Assassin's Creed Ezio Trilogy".

• Assassin's Creed 2 (Node: game, ID: 1)
  • Assassin's Creed 2 (Node: release, ID: 2)
  • Assassin's Creed Ezio Trilogy (Node: release, ID: 3)
• Assassin's Creed Brotherhood (Node: game, ID: 4)
  • Assassin's Creed Brotherhood (node: release, ID: 5)
  • Assassin's Creed Ezio Trilogy (Node: release, ID: 3)

When I view the node "Assasin's Creed 2" I'm currently seeing both releases one after the other. I styled these using display suite and they look fine. However I want to display only one of them at a time with a tab, select list, or something of the like to allow me to switch between them.

My thoughts

• I was unable to find a module that could perform this but I feel one may exist.
• I could use a simple jquery tab ajax but wasn't sure if their was already a drupal way to do this.
• Perhaps I could use exposed views and a views embed field to show all the referenced nodes but then the performance would suffer significantly.

The question

How do I display an entity reference field as tabbed or select list content? Preferably without the performance drop of an embedded view.

Answer 1

You have 2 relatively simple options without creating your own module and field display code (in a module).

1. use Views to generate the select lists you want. You can do this for example with a ctools dropdown or jumpto displays. While you're using a view you can always set Views to cache the results of your view so its not cumbersome after the 1st page load for all other visitors. You can even define views and attach them to your node if you want with field_views_field module.

2. Use Display Suite on your site and create a Custom Field in DS for any fields you want custom output for, like your select list. Then in the PHP area of the custom field you can access the currently loaded $entity fields and generate whatever HTML you want for your field output. You would then hide the default field display of your field, and show your custom DS created field for your content type.

I'm about to do (2) above with a slideshow content type where per-slide the content editor can select the text foreground and background color using the field_color module which would best match an uploaded image to the Node. Then in DS I will make a custom "slide_text" dyanamic field that examines the color values and basically outputs:

<?php
// This is pseudocode and untested.
$wrapper = entity_metadata_wrapper('node' $entity);
$text_color = $wrapper->field_foreground_color->value();
$bg_color = $wrapper->field_background_color->value();
$text = $wrapper->field_slide_text->value();
echo <<<EOFHTML
<span class="ds-slide-content-field"
      style="color: $text_color;
             background-color: $bg_color">
    $text
</span">
EOFHTML;
?>