[pmwiki-devel] page text variables in edit form?

[Ben Stallings]

I'm making some encouraging progress on the DataQuery recipe, and 
learning a lot in the process!  But I've run into a question that I 
believe goes off the map of the existing documentation.  I'm pretty sure 
Caveman and Crisses have already discussed this, but there's been so 
much talk about page text variables here on the list I haven't been able 
to follow it and don't know where to start looking in the archives, so 
bear with me please...

To encourage data integrity, the DataQuery recipe generates a 
$Group/EditForm page based on the structure of the database table 
assigned to that group.  When you edit a page in the group, it uses this 
page as its EditForm unless told not to.  The form has a separate form 
field for each of the page text variables (i.e. database fields) in the 
page being edited.

The tricky part is getting these page text variables to appear in the 
form, since they're on another page.  I'm using the {*$:varname} syntax 
as suggested for headers and footers, but it doesn't seem to work in 
this case.  (Yes, I'm using the most recent beta.)

Is there something about ?action=edit that prevents the parsing of page 
text variables?  Or am I just doing it wrong?  Thanks in advance!  --Ben S.