How to select existing items when adding blocks?

[jdjoshuadavison]

Describe the bug
When adding a block using the Flexible Editor, it goes straight to the Creating X in Xs drawer and does not give me the option to select an existing item.

Screen.Recording.2023-07-24.at.13.25.43.mov

To Reproduce
Install flexible editor extension in a new project and follow the usage-with-relation-nodes.mp4 video to set it up.

Flexible Editor Version:
1.0.3

Directus Version:
10.4.3

[formfcw]

Thanks for the question! I converted this to a Q&A, as this is the correct behavior.

The correct way to do this is to create a collection like related_items and use this instead. In this new collection you then create a M2M or O2M (or M2A) field that relates to your items collection.

I then would suggest putting those kind of collections used by Flexible Editor into a folder called Editor or Editor Collections or whatever. This keeps the structure of your data model readable. Check out the video (at the beginning) in this section of the README: https://github.com/formfcw/directus-extension-flexible-editor#usage-with-relation-nodes

[jdjoshuadavison]

Oookay. I got it. Thanks so much for this.

[jablonski]

That solves the problem, but the setup is quite hard. Maybe you can create a short video how to setup this use case? Would help a lot.

[smarchesini-DQ]

Could you explain how to do this with an example please? I want to be able to use existing collection items but can not figure out exactly how to do that. TIA

[formfcw]

I’ve created a video tutorial: https://github.com/formfcw/directus-extension-flexible-editor#tutorial-relation-node-with-existing-items

[jablonski]

Very nice and much appreciated! Thank you very much.