I am making a website for an art gallery that represents ~50 artists. I have created separate CMS collections for both the “represented artists” and “all artworks.” I have referenced the corresponding artist on the “all artworks” CMS collection. There has been no problem creating a dynamic list page to view all represented artists or making a scrolling repeater for the homepage.
The problem comes in when I try to add a repeater (that only shows the artwork of the corresponding artist) to a dynamically created artist’s page. As it is, I cannot get the repeater to show only the artwork by that specific artist.
When I change the repeater connections on the “template” artist page, it changes it on all of them.
I have tried a few workarounds including making individual CMS collections for each artist vs one “Full Artworks” CMS collection. This didn’t solve the issue, as I am still unable to change the repeater on one dynamic page without changing it on all of the dynamic artist pages.
I’ve always found reference & multi-reference fields to be terrible to use, they break a lot and aren’t easily transferable if you ever needed to transfer your data to a new site etc.
So here’s my way of doing this sort of thing in case anyone wants to try an alternative:
In your Artist collection make a new tag field, call it “tag” or “artistname” or whatever you want and put in something simple to identify each specific artist. Then in your Images collection create a new tag field, call it “tags” or “artists” for example and fill in that field with the SAME artist tag info. Now on your artist dynamic page connect your image gallery/repeater to the art collection and filter the tags to be the “Same As” your tag field for the dynamic page collection (artist in this case). Now it’ll only show the matching art for each dynamic Artist page.
And of course you can tag more than 1 artist if a collaboration was needed, it works just like a multi-reference field where that collaboration artwork would then show up on both their individual pages.
I use this all the time for anything like that, you could also use text fields matching say the Artist name field in the Artist collection and add an “Artist” text field and match those 2 fields in the dataset filter instead, I just find a designated tag system works better for me, in your case this might be the cleanest way.
Thank you so much for your response. Okay I am running into an issue in that when I select the Tags option from the collection filter, I do not have an option to immediately check “same as” instead, it prompts me to pick another collection?
Sorry, that’s my fault, it should look how you have it in the screenshot, not Same As (that’s a whole different thing I was thinking of for some reason…), so I think if you use that setup how you have it in the screenshot then it should work? I set mine to “Includes any of” since I know all the tags I made are unique to each entry but as long as both tag fields are the same it should work how you have it I would think!
