Displaying all the entity reference entities in a view

Question

I have a "press release" node type which uses entityreference to link to any number of file_entity images, another field for file_entity videos and another to file_entity audio files.

There is a need for a block to display the first six images from the most recent press release, with some text from the press release.

So I built a view that finds the most recent press release and then displays the first six image entities. Or it should have but it doesn't, it always reports zero images (or zero videos, or zero audio files) regardless of how many there are.

So I ripped into Views to find the problem and discovered that entityreference does not provide a field handler, as a result Views assumes it's referring to a node and not an image and it all goes pear-shaped.

All entityreference does is provide a relationship handler, which is fine as far as it goes but you can only display one entry from the list of references - the first one.

Am I really going to go completely non-intuitive and have the images as the main table, and then sort by and group by parent press release node?

Any better ideas? (Short of writing a proper Views field handler?)

Answer 1

I think you will need to create a view of image entities, rather than nodes. The use a reverse relationship with the node that references it as a filter.

Answer 2

The real solution is a proper field handler, but I don't have time to implement that in my current contract so I'll just bypass the problem:

Create a block that can be configured with a specific entry (or chooses the latest) and hard code the display to be what's required.

That's the way it goes.

Answer 3

You can use the Content Dependency module. It provides you references via tab and supports following modules: node reference / entity reference.

Here is an excerpt about it from the module's project page:

Provides ability to view reversed referrals/references for content of entity reference & references - node_reference modules, etc.

Generally, this project enables content authors to see from any current content (entity) its dependent entities content.

Project overcome a major content control difficulty for content authors.

Provide content authors ability to track external content which refers to current content, without the need to check mass of external content to find out whether each external content refers to current content or not.