Best Practice: Seasons and Episodes for TV Shows?

[meager oxide]

I have a collection type called "TV Show" and in it I would like to include all seasons and all episodes. Within each episode will be the release date, run time, title, synopsis, and a few relationships to other collections.

I am hoping to create a custom amount of seasons for each TV show, and inside of each Season add a custom amount of Episodes with the desired fields above.

How would you recommend proceeding with this, to make it as easy to use as possible?

[warm kraken]

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[bronze tartan]

Will you ever need to access specific episodes individually?

[meager oxide]

Yes, just to add a title, description, release date, and collection type relationship to each episode

Something similar to this https://www.themoviedb.org/tv/45-top-gear/seasons

[bronze tartan]

Cool then basically as you described: shows < seasons < episodes

Where < is O2M

[meager oxide]

ty 🙂

[meager oxide]

Sorry I have another question, would you recommend a many to many relationship where I have Season as a collection type and TV Show as a collection type?

On each TV show I will need to add a release date, synopsis and thumbnail somehow for each season and episode, without it merging or overwriting all other TV shows that also share that same collection type of season 1, episode 1 for example..

Each episode is also tied to another collection type called Vehicle where I connect the vehicles for each of episode each TV show.

Would Directus be able to handle this or is it going a bit beyond the scope of what it’s capable of?

[bronze tartan]

Many to Many makes no sense - an episode is part of one season, which is part of one show

Unless I've misunderstood something, it seems pretty clean cut to me

[meager oxide]

I need to add information on each episode, and also connect vehicle collection types to each episode. If I do everything from the TV show collection type directly, how would I do that on per episode basis?

[bronze tartan]

Can you scribble down what you're thinking for a data model? I'm no longer following what you mean

[meager oxide]

No prob, I will draw a diagram and get back to you 🙂 Thanks!

[meager oxide]

Please excuse the messy writing but I hope this gets the idea across.. each TV show (content type) will have their own vehicle relationships (another content type). Unknown number of seasons and episodes per TV show, it depends on the show

[meager oxide]

My bad with wording.. “Collection” should really say “Content Type” as that’s what they are called in Directus

[pale quarry]

That's sounds fairly simple. One episode belongs to one season. Season belongs to one TV Show. You can setup reverse relationship too for ease, TV Show has many season, season has many tv show.

[meager oxide]

So how should I set it up exactly within Directus admin panel for the TV show content type?

[bronze tartan]

Yeah this is where I started as well - feels pretty straightforward

[pale quarry]

The many to one relationship is setup like this :

And then you setup one to many from the other side:

[meager oxide]

"Many to One" only allows me to pick a single Season for each TV Show. Most TV shows have more than 1 season.

When I go to the TV Show I would like to see a list of all seasons, all episodes, and all vehicles linked to each episode

I have created content types for each now: TV Show, Season, and Episode

[bronze tartan]

I would encourage you to play around with all of the display options because I think it will do what you want

[meager oxide]

to get it looking like this for each TV show, I have not found a way to do so yet

where I have X number of Seasons, X number of Episodes, and each episode has X number of vehicles... all from the TV Show content type screen

Perhaps a better way to visualize this is:
Vehicle -> Add to TV Show
Pick TV Show ... loading new select for season
Pick Season ... loading new select for episode
Pick Episode
Save

A vehicle can be added to many TV Shows..
I don't know if Directus can handle this with the "loading new select" part or not

[bronze tartan]

We don't do that

You MIGHT be able to build a custom display for it

[meager oxide]

Do you know if this feature will be added to Directus in the future? Not sure what to call it.. almost like Tree View but for different child inputs based on the parent

[bronze tartan]

Conditional M2M dropdowns maybe. You can check if there's an open feature request on our GitHub repo and, if not, open one up.

[meager oxide]

I can think of one way to do it with M2M but it's prob not the best way..
Each Season I need to label with the TV show name
Top Gear Season 1
Jay Leno's Garage Season 1

And each episode I need to label with the TV show name
Top Gear Season 1 Episode 1
Top Gear Season 1 Episode 2

Probably not the most efficient... but it might work for the time being...
If the TV Show name ever changes it would be a lot of work to update every season and episode manually

[pale quarry]

Your vehicle m2m relationship between the vehicle and the episode could have additional fields to denormalize some of the data (ex: attach the tv show directly, attach the season directly). That could be automated through flows. But from a UI perspective, Directus isn't an "app builder" per say, you would need to create a custom UI for that (or a custom extension if you want to stay inside Directus)

[meager oxide]

If I’m building custom to achieve my desired outcomes maybe it would be in my best interest to build my own API. It would be a lot more work but it would mean getting exactly what I need. My concern is with vendor lock in. Now that I have started with Directus and have over 300,000 vehicle entries tied to relationships is this going to be tricky to remove Directus as an added later? Just curious in general.. it has been a nagging question for me as I build. If I start with Directus for a large scale project such as this do I need to stick with Directus for good?