Relationships to multiple channels: how to know which channel you're picking from?

Question

I have a relationships field which pulls in from two channels: Posts and Programs. When the client is creating a page, this field enables them to manually relate the page to a number of blog posts and nonprofit programs, which appear in a "Related Content" section.

But EE 2.8's Relationships field only shows the title of an entry in the relationship picker. If a Post and a Program have similar titles or the same title, there seems to be no way for the client to know which is which.

Has anyone found a solution or workaround for this?

I've sort-of found a workaround using Playa, but it's not great. Playa is an addon for managing relationships. It allows relations to multiple channels and its related entry picker does let you filter by channel. Unfortunately...

1. It requires several clicks to start filtering by channel
2. While it lets you filter by one channel at a time, you have to keep switching the filter back and forth to select multiple entries from different channels.
3. Once you've picked relationships and they appear in the right column, there's no indication of which channel they came from.

I'm new to EE, but I could imagine creating an addon which simply overrides the output of the Relationships picker to show something like <channel_name>: <title> instead of <title>.

Answer 1

I ended up solving this with a small patch to two EE core files. First, I have the relationships fieldtype query select the name of the channel:

// system/expressionengine/fieldtypes/relationship/ft.relationship.php:339
// Old
->select('channel_titles.entry_id, channel_titles.title')
// New
->select('channel_titles.entry_id, channel_titles.title, channels.channel_title')
->join('channels', 'channel_titles.channel_id = channels.channel_id')

Then I output the channel title before each listing in the relationships picker:

<!-- system/expressionengine/fieldtypes/relationship/views/publish.php:34 -->
<!-- As the first line within the <label> -->
<?= $row['channel_title'] ?>:

Now, when an admin sees two entries both called "Something Awesome" in the relationship picker, they'll know which is which: