parent/child nodes

I really need to figure a better way to manage parent/child relationships. I was not a big fan of any of the modules I tried out, but maybe they merit another review. I want two things:

• bi-directional node reference fields
• field accessibility from either side of that link

If there were way to override or define new handlers for fields, the second would be pretty easy. For now I will have to make do with theming individual fields. I'll have to give some more thought to the first one.

I did end up using edit views in a block to do some embedded child-node management. I used the submit op of hook_nodeapi in a custom module to update some stuff about the parent on the submit. I'm storing a brief summary serialized array in a textfield in the parent. It has been handy for calculating subtotals in a view.