Editview

Editview is useful when you want to be able to quickly add or edit multiple nodes. It works best when you’re working with nodes that don’t have a huge number of fields, because each field you include adds to the width of the display, and it’s awkward to scroll horizontally.

Using Editview

Editview for Drupal 7 is only available through the Agile Humanities Agency Github repo agile_editview. Click on the green “Clone or download” button, right-click (or control-click on Mac) on the “Download zip” option that will appear, and copy the URL. Then, you can paste that URL into the module installation UI just like you would a URL from drupal.org. Enable the module.

Create a new view, and display Content whatever type you want to edit or add. (While you can display more than one content type, you can only add new nodes for a single content type, so it makes the most sense to limit your editview to just one content type.) In most cases, it makes sense to create a page, but you could create a block as well (or instead) depending on your needs. For display format, choose “Editview”. Hit “continue and edit”, and add the fields to the view display that correspond to each field you want to allow people to edit through the editview. If you’re using it to create new nodes, you should include at least all the required fields.

Under “Format”, click the “Settings” option next to “Editview”. Choose the node type that should be created if you add a new node, using the dropdown at the top. (This should generally correspond to the one content type you’re displaying in the view in general.) You can choose whether you want the new node form to be above or below the results of the view.

You may want to add one or more exposed filters to make it easier to navigate to the nodes you want to edit. If you do have exposed filters, though, keep in mind that while you can create a new node that doesn’t match the filter criteria, it will disappear from the display after you save it, until you reset the filters to include the new node.

Notes and shortcomings

Editview for Drupal 7 was developed by Agile Humanities Agency and thoroughly tested for one project's specific needs, which align with the needs of numerous -- but far from all -- digital humanities project using Drupal. There are opportunities to support further development of the module to accommodate additional use cases. Known issues are listed below; if you've found another bug, or are supporting development to address one of these bugs, please let me know.

  • Editview doesn't work well with field collections, especially if there are multi-valued fields in the field collection. (Data entered as the first value is erased when you click the button to add as econd value.)

Example: Bulgarian Dialectology as Living Tradition

Bulgarian Dialectology as Living Tradition, a project by Professor Ronelle Alexander at UC Berkeley, funded the development of a Drupal 7 version of the Editview module, which was originally developed for Drupal 6. That site’s data model has a different content type for each level of granularity: a “line” content type that contains pointers to nodes from a “token” (word) content type and also has a pointer to a “text” content type that contains all the lines in the text along with a pointer to a “location” content type. Editview is the only way to meaningfully edit the content of a text, bringing together all the “line” nodes that make up the text.

Data model for Bulgarian Dialectology as Living Tradition

The data model used by Bulgarian Dialectology as Living Tradition.

Add and edit lines interface for Bulgarian Dialectology as Living Tradition

The "add and edit lines" interface for Bulgarian Dialectology as Living Tradition. Additional field continue off-screen.

Editview also makes it easier to set up workflows and different distributions of labor. Some data entry assistants are tasked with adding lines, and in the process of adding lines, they create new tokens (words). Then, other data entry assistants are able to use Views to see all recently-created words, and assign appropriate grammatical metadata. Collaborators in Bulgaria work on adding dialectal and other linguistic metadata to each token (word).

Editing empty tokens

Interface for editing empty tokens (words without grammatical metadata) on Bulgarian Dialectology as Living Tradition.

Editing linguistic traits

Interface for editing linguistic traits on Bulgarian Dialectology as Living Tradition.

Modules: