Item10025: title attribute cannot be easily customised

Priority:	CurrentState:	AppliesTo:	Component:	WaitingFor:
Enhancement	Proposal Required	Engine	DataForms, FoswikiUsability

Hey folks!

Using the suggestion of PaulHarvey in Support.Question593 to change the title of a formfield with [[TheField][Arbitrary title? Yes!]] does not work!

For example I have this form definition:

Name	Type	Size	Values	Tooltip message	Attributes
Field 1	select	1	, it, does, not, work	add a summary

And in certain topics I already have saved data for the name definition Field 1.

Metatext looks like this

%META:FIELD{name="Field 1" attributes="" title="Field 1" value="does"}%

When I know change this form definition to:

Name	Type	Size	Values	Tooltip message	Attributes
Field 1[ThisIsAnArbitraryName]]	select	1	, it, does, not, work	add a summary

I would expect that the topics keep the data saved and archieved under the name Field 1 and just the title in view and edit mode changed! But it behaves like this is a totally new introduced field for Foswiki. This is also reflected in the meta data

Metatext looks now like this

%META:FIELD{name="ThisIsAnArbitraryName" attributes="" title="[[Field 1]][ThisIsAnArbitraryName]]" value=""}%

This means title change is not possible without losing all the data AND future title changes will loose data again! I think this does not work as designed and led to a lot of misunderstandings.

I'm aware of WorkArounds with FlexFormPlugin etc. but I do really think that this should be a core feature that needs to work without further knowledge in TML.

-- PaulHahler - 15 Nov 2010

You're right, I don't know what I was smoking that day The [[LinkTarget][Field Name]] trick only changes the link target, and does not help you change the link text to be different to the field name at all.

This is indeed a missing feature. Alternative is to use FlexFormPlugin and AutoViewTemplatePlugin to customise the form appearance.

Regarding as a (useful) enhancement

-- PaulHarvey - 15 Nov 2010

No problem everyone has a bad day from time to time. ;D

I also saw that this kind of feature is already promoted in Support.FAQ14 by you. Maybe we should change that because for Newbies it can get quite frustrating if something does not work when they pick up the work with the data forms.

What next step would we have to do to get this on his way?

-- PaulHahler - 16 Nov 2010

Ouch! How embarrassing. I have corrected that topic. Can I make an apology to the internet? Well, it's done now.

In my opinion, DataForms needs more than just an update to allow customised field titles. In any case, a new 'column' would be needed, and I think there would be some resistance to that. So I'd like to invite you to contribute to Development.BrainstormingDataFormDefinitions. If we can develop a spec, it may go through the feature proposal process.

Other DataForms dev topics: CentralizeHtmlFormHandling and DataFormInheritance

-- PaulHarvey - 17 Nov 2010