Posted by Egmund on Tue, Aug 20, 2019 - 4:40am --- Updated: Aug 20 '19 - 4:42am

Is there a way in BackdropCMS to create a view pulling fields from two related (many-to-many (yes, via a third table)) tables in an external database (on the same server/domain)?

Comments

Wed, Aug 21, 2019 - 11:59pm by Egmund

Had hoped for a reason to 'stick with' Backdrop but - - - -

I will try the mentioned module in Drupal, but it is unlikely it will give me more than one table at a time/per view.

Thu, Aug 22, 2019 - 5:16am by laryn

Maybe someone else knows of something out of the box that will do this, but I've not heard of it.

If you're looking for inspiration, you could look at the module above to see how easy it would be to implement in Backdrop, or the CiviCRM-Backdrop integration which allows Views on CiviCRM tables. By using relationships in the view, you can pull information from multiple tables in the external CiviCRM database. But to adapt that for your own custom use might be a big undertaking.

Thu, Aug 22, 2019 - 1:26pm by stpaultim

My team has used this Drupal 7 module before, but I have not used it much personally.

https://www.drupal.org/project/data

It has helped us access data in custom tables that are part of the same database for our Drupal 7 site. It has not been ported to Backdrop and I am unaware of any other Backdrop CMS solutions for this problem.

Fri, Aug 23, 2019 - 1:01am by Egmund

Thank you all for the various suggestions. I will test the Drupal modules (& check how/if I can convert them to Backdrop (if they work as required)) - otherwise the 'simple' solution seems to be using Modx Revolution instead.

Olafski's picture

Fri, Sep 06, 2019 - 3:05pm by Olafski

What are you trying to accomplish, Egmund? There might be solutions, or workarounds, it depends on the use case. One idea: import the external content via the Feeds module, so that it becomes part of the Backdrop database.

Sat, Sep 07, 2019 - 1:45am by Egmund

Thank you Olaf for responding.

I originally imported (yes, via 'feeds') two tables into Drupal 7, and that worked ok except I never figured out how to relate the two in Views so that I could pull fields from the related table into the view.

I (stupidly) converted to Drupal 8 (since converting to Backdrop failed utterly) and the tables got very messy - column names had to be cleaned and several columns deleted when exporting the tables for other use.

Now I am experimenting with the 'Data' module in D7 and at least it keeps my column names clean. But the module is immature and buggy - and I still need to figure out relationships in Views.

Sat, Sep 07, 2019 - 4:57am by Egmund

To clarify: I need a 'many-to-many' relationship between two tables (yes, via a third table). One could be 'users' and the other 'nodes', but I would prefer 'external' tables (but in the Backdrop/Drupal database).

Wed, Oct 15, 2025 - 12:26am by Egmund

Years later:

I have been overlooking the fact that fields in content types can have more 'numbers of values'. It was hidden under 'Global settings'.

Setting this to more than one I now have relational database features in BackdropCMS views - no need for external databases.