Using Relationships or Grid to structure content of books

Question

I'm looking to organize and display a library of books.

Within each book are chapters and my plan was to use the new Relationship features within EE to relate the entries made in a separate "chapters" channel to a particular "book".

I'm wondering if the Grid is possibly a better way of entering the chapter listing for each book without creating separate channels or relationships.

I also want to include a link to a file with each chapter.

Any suggestion as to how to best structure this and take advantage of some of the newer EE features in 2.7.2 would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

If there aren't going to be any instances where a chapter will be connected to a multiple books (and if their are, it's an important data point), I would go with a single book channel where the entry title is the title of the book.

I would then have a two-column (minimum) Grid. The first column would be the title of the chapter, the second would then be a link to the file with that chapter.

If there will be only a few instances where one chapter / chapter file might be associated with a different book, consider just manually adding the same chapter row in each entry rather than going the whole relationship route.

So, short answer is, you're on the right track but if there will be multiple books containing the same chapters (more than you want to manually update each and every entry in case you need to revise something) then relationships are probably the way to go.