Feature Proposal: Allow for displayed field title

Motivation

The current docs for DataForms suggests that it's possible to define a custom displayed title for form fields but the documentation is wrong (as documented in Tasks.Item12090). It seems like this is a legitimate need that should be addressed.

Description and Documentation

I'm really not sure what is possible here, so I'll just start the conversation by proposing what's currently stated under System/DataForms#Name: "If you want the Field name to include embedded spaces, use the format [<nop>[FieldName][Descriptive human-friendly Field Name]]". I don't know about the <nop>... that looks like a typo in the erroneous doc. Perhaps they meant to say simply " If you want the Field name to include embedded spaces, use the format [[FieldName][Descriptive human-friendly Field Name]] ".

Even with that correction, I'm not sure how viable a solution this is as it overlaps with the feature of referencing a different topic from which to get field values. It also (kind of) conflicts with the whole precedence of double-braket syntax being used exclusively for links where as it would not be here.

Another possibility would be to follow the syntax precedence of the "+value" idea for field values. So one would enter "ActualFieldName=My displayed field name" and the meta data would look like this:

%META:FIELD{name="ActualFieldName" attributes="" title="My displayed field name" value=""}%

Examples

Impact

WhatDoesItAffect:

%WHATDOESITAFFECT%

edit

Implementation

-- Contributors: LynnwoodBrown - 27 Apr 2015

Discussion

This is plain broken. Moreover each formfield in each topic holds the display title in a redundant way. The title field in %META:FIELD simply should be removed. It does not belong there. It doesn't let you change or translate the interface. It doesn't let you have two different display titles for the same data.

FlexFormPlugin is an available solutions today:

%RENDERFORDISPLAY{
   topic="SomeTopic"
   ActualFieldName_title="%MAKETEXT{"My displayed field name"}%"
}%

%RENDERFORDISPLAY{
   topic="SomeTopic"
   ActualFieldName_title="%MAKETEXT{"Same data, other title"}%"
}%

Next releases of FlexFormPlugin and MultiLingualPlugin interact with each other automatically to translate formfield titles and display values using a wiki app in WebLexicon. This will also be integrated part of the WikiWorkbenchContrib framework.

-- MichaelDaum - 28 Apr 2015

Sounds promising

-- FranzJosefGigler - 28 Apr 2015

Lynnwood, no committed developer or date, and as Michael points out, storing the display title redundantly in the topics is not a good approach. Can this proposal be rejected?

-- GeorgeClark - 24 Mar 2017

Agreed. Sorry this took so long for me to get around to this topic again. In the absence of a committed developer or even a fleshed-out proposal, let's cut this one loose. Setting to rejected by consensus.

-- LynnwoodBrown - 03 Oct 2017

Commenting is disabled while not logged in