IRRE / inline¶

Inline Relational Record Editing (IRRE) is a way of editing parent-child-relations in the backend view. Instead of child records already having to exist, new child records are created using AJAX calls (to prevent reloading the complete backend view).

The type='inline' is a powerful element that can handle many types of relation, including simple 1:n and nested 1:n-1:n relations, aswell as m:n relations with different view aspects and localization setups. When combined with 'ctrl' and 'types' properties in the TCA a huge amount of different views are possible.

The inline type was mainly designed to handle 1:n relations, where one parent record has many children and each child has only one parent. Children can not be transferred from one parent to another.

However, m:n relations can be setup using intermediate tables. An m:n relation is where a child has many parents. In addition to the main parent-child relation fields in the intermediate table, fields can be added to attach additional information to the parent-child relation. One example of this is "FAL" / resource handling in the Core. A parent record (for instance table "tt_content") is connected via table "sys_file_reference" to a media resource in "sys_file". A sys_file record has table "sys_file_metadata" as a child record which holds meta information about the file (for instance a description). This information can be overwritten for the specific file resource used in "tt_content" by adding a new description in "sys_file_reference". There are inline and field properties in the TCA such as "placeholder" to set this up.