[pmwiki-users] Minor changes to WikiForms

[John Rankin]

Summary of response:

Issues B and C seem to be straightforward and I'll look
at them over the weekend.

Issue A, I don't yet have a good answer.

On Thursday, 3 March 2005 2:47 AM, Hugo Fjelsted Alrøe <Hugo.Alroe at agrsci.dk> wrote:
>Thank you for making the PITS issue tracking system available in
>a flexible form for general use, John. I have installed
>WikiForms and it seems to work very well, but there are a few
>issues. 
>
Issue A
=======
>Adding additional points (like in PITS, e.g. 54532) to the
>importance or urgency fields (by way of edit page) does not
>seem to change the score in the list of issues. I tried on
>Affinity wiki as well with the same result. 

That's correct. I haven't been able to work out a clean way
to do this. Issues include:

- one can use a pick list / radio button input and have one
  controlled value (eg 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5) or have a text input 
  field and multiple uncontrolled values (eg 5432987), but
  not both at the same time

- if one uses a radio button, then somebody uses Edit Page to
  append another number, then somebody clicks Edit Form, at
  the moment it will probably break

- what should it do with multiple values when calculating a
  score (assume values are 1-9 and take an average, rounded 
  to the nearest integer?)

I'll think about this and see if I can come up with a tidy
solution that's simple to implement.

The simplest option would be to have separate 'score' and
'vote' fields, and maintain the score manually, based on
the votes. But we ought to be able to do better than that.

>
Issue B
=======
>I wanted to make some of the text boxes in the form shorter,
>and wanted to follow these suggestions from the Cookbook description:
>  ([1-9][0-9]*) the number of lines for several text boxes; these get joined with \\ markup
>But I cannot get it to work - can you explain a bit more?

If the template says:

:Address:address (3)

You get the following form effect:

Address: [                 ]
         [                 ]
         [                 ]

In other words, 3 lines (from the '(3)') and these get
joined using \\ markup to force line breaks on output.

What I think you are asking for is a new feature, to specify
the length of a form field's box. At the moment, these are
hard coded. So we need to add a template markup to override
the defaults. This should include an option to control the
number of rows in a text area field as well.

This will be easy to implement once I come up with a suitable 
markup.

I'll do some experimenting and issue an update...
>
Issues C
========
>I also thought it would be nice if one could specify changes to
>the fields that are included in the list of issues, in the
>wikilist directive. Something like
>  (:wikilist status=closed !opened closed:) 
>That is, include the field 'Date closed' and leave out the
>field 'Date opened'. As it is, the fields that are shown in the
>list of issues are specified on the FormTemplate page (by way
>of a + or - sort order indication). I don't know whether this
>is feasible, though.

I *think* this will be do-able. So different (:wikilist:)
directives will include different fields, using the template
as the default list. 
>
>In any case, this will be a very useful tool for us!
>Hugo
>(testing at http://orgprints.org/wiki/Development)
>


-- 
JR
--
John Rankin