How would I go about making a node to node relationship that inherits node status

Question

I have tried using Drupal 5 and 6 and can't find a solution...

I have been trying for months to get this seemingly simple functionality. a simple example would be this:

you create a book (parent) with 10 pages (children). If you delete or un-publish the book the children remain. to me, this makes no sense at all.

So my question is how to achieve this with not necessarily books, but content types in general. a few things to consider:

I have tried node relativity. I have tried node hierarchy

I was hoping that maybe I could use comments since they provide the perfect functionality (delete the node and all it's comments get deleted too). I know there is a comment as nodes as nodes (there is a module and I have tried it). But the problem is that I need multiple content types and multiple comment types because I am also using posting quotas and need content type a to only post say 10 comments but content type b to post 20 comments. there is no comment type though, so that's not an option. Anyone have any ideas?

Answer 1

Putting this in a module would be pretty simple, it's just a matter of implementing hook_nodeapi() to propagate your deletions & status changes to the book's children. I don't really know the Book module but I'd assume that it's relatively easy to find the children of a Book node.

Answer 2

I haven't used these modules, but together they seem like they might provide a solution for the cascading deletion of a node referenced by another:

Node Relationships http://drupal.org/project/noderelationships

And also Referential Integrity for CCK (sorry couldn't include link for this due to limit of 1 link on comments)