Current set of possible additions and known bugs

[Yaron Koren]

For the sake of record-keeping, here's the current list of possible new additions to Semantic Forms, and known bugs. Most of these have been brought up at some point on this mailing list; hopefully many of them can be handled within the next month or so.

Additions:
- combobox (i.e., adding a dropdown) for autocomplete fields
- comma-separated autocompletion, so you can have autocompletion for a list of items within a single text-entry field
(these two may require switching to a different Ajax/Javascript library)
- handling wiki markup in form definition pages
- a radiobutton input type
- a "date/time" input type
- support for Float fields with units (see http://ontoworld.org/wiki/Help:Custom_units)
- improvements to "Create Template" page, possibly including allowing for form-based creation of attributes and relations

Longer-term additions:
- an "editable grid", for multiple templates (see http://extjs.com/deploy/ext/examples/grid/edit-grid.html for an example)
- support for entering geographical coordinates, using OpenLayers or some other mapping API

Bugs:
- Javascript "innerHTML" problem on non-Firefox browsers
- "restricted" fields not carrying forward their value
- problems with ampersands in page titles (only happens on certain sites, probably due to differences in .htaccess files)
- automatic add-to-watchlist hook not getting activated on page save

Please let me know if I'm missing anything here. Also, if you'd like to volunteer to take on any of these issues, please let me know. Some are already being looked at by myself and other people, but if anyone specifically can find a Javascript library that can do all the autocompletion stuff required, or wants to look at parsing wiki markup, or bugs #3 or 4, it would be very much appreciated.

Thanks,
Yaron

[Yaron Koren]

I should have figured I'd leave some stuff out... I realized soon after sending this that I forgot at least three requested additions and one bug that have come up recently on the mailing list. Here's the updated version, with the new ones at the bottom of each list. As before (even more so now, actually), if anyone wants to take on any of the "unassigned" issues, feel free.

-Yaron

Additions:
- combobox (i.e., adding a dropdown) for autocomplete fields
- comma-separated autocompletion, so you can have autocompletion for a list of items within a single text-entry field
(these two may require switching to a different Ajax/Javascript library)
- handling wiki markup in form definition pages
- a radiobutton input type
- a "date/time" input type
- support for Float fields with units (see http://ontoworld.org/wiki/Help:Custom_units)
- improvements to "Create Template" page, possibly including allowing for form-based creation of attributes and relations

- better handling of case where Semantic MediaWiki is not installed
- turning each save into a "save-and-refresh", to allow red links to point to the right page
- letting users configure the text that shows up in the 'AddPage' page

Longer-term additions:
- an "editable grid", for multiple templates (see http://extjs.com/deploy/ext/examples/grid/edit-grid.html for an example)
- support for entering geographical coordinates, using OpenLayers or some other mapping API

Bugs:
- Javascript "innerHTML" problem on non-Firefox browsers
- "restricted" fields not carrying forward their value
- problems with ampersands in page titles (only happens on certain sites, probably due to differences in .htaccess files)
- automatic add-to-watchlist hook not getting activated on page save

- piped links not showing up correctly on form editing

[Sergey Chernyshev]

Yaron,

What about intermixed free-text and templates we discussed?
BTW, should we use Bugzilla for this kind of list?

     Sergey

[Leonardo de Oliveira Costa]

I think we could have an option to send the information added in forms
to a specific E-mail. Example: i would like to some people fill forms
but without save the information on the wiki. At first i would like to
see the information and latter save this information on the wiki.
The forms could be configurable for example to not save the information
for non logged users and to send this information to a specific E-mail,
or only sysop have option to save the page. (Configurable like we want)

[Yaron Koren]

Hi Sergey,

The problem with having more than one "free text" field is that things can get confused very quickly. What if a page has two templates, but they're in reverse order from how they appear in the form? What should happen to the free text between the two? There's the potential for all sorts of unexpected behavior, and I don't know if it's worth the trouble.

As far as Bugzilla - I'm fine with using the mailing list for now. The code is still at the stage where it's not clear what's a bug, what's a feature, and what needs more discussion. Of course, if anyone wants to submit bugs directly to Bugzilla, they're welcome to...

-Yaron

[Yaron Koren]

Such an idea seems outside the scope of Semantic Forms, or even of MediaWiki in general, which is a document-editing application and not an emailing application. This feature doesn't particularly interest me; however, if anyone else is interested in such a feature, feel free to write in.

-Yaron

[Eep²]

There are other extensions that allow form emailing (see http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Category:Email_extensions ), but how hard
would it be to add it into Semantic Forms? I can't imagine that hard since form mailing is fairly old...

From: Yaron Koren
Sent: Wednesday, August 01, 2007 5:22 PM

Such an idea seems outside the scope of Semantic Forms, or even of MediaWiki in general, which is a document-editing application and
not an emailing application. This feature doesn't particularly interest me; however, if anyone else is interested in such a feature,
feel free to write in.

[Yaron Koren]

Ah, I didn't know about those email extensions; good to know. I guess it's not outside the scope of MediaWiki at all, then. Still, it seems like a big change for Semantic Forms. A lot of the page names (like 'Add Data') and the wording of the text, and the "Save" button that appears at the bottom, are all focused on the idea that the user will be modifying actual content of the site; they'd all have to be changed in some way if the output could be just an email.

And the fact those extensions exist mean it should be fairly easy to create such an email form already.

All that said, as before, I'd like to know if other people are also interested in such a thing.

-Yaron

[Eep²]

Well, having to convert Semantic Forms (SF) into another form extension's syntax would be annoying. It would be better to have such functionality within SF itself without having to rely on yet another extension to do something fairly simple. Sure, it might mean making SF more generalized, but is that so bad? It might make it more usable to others. Still, form emailing isn't that high on my want list for SF; I'm just playing devil's advocate. ;)

 

From: Yaron Koren

Sent: Thursday, August 02, 2007 8:55 AM

 

Ah, I didn't know about those email extensions; good to know. I guess it's not outside the scope of MediaWiki at all, then. Still, it seems like a big change for Semantic Forms. A lot of the page names (like 'Add Data') and the wording of the text, and the "Save" button that appears at the bottom, are all focused on the idea that the user will be modifying actual content of the site; they'd all have to be changed in some way if the output could be just an email.

And the fact those extensions exist mean it should be fairly easy to create such an email form already.

All that said, as before, I'd like to know if other people are also interested in such a thing.

[Sergey Chernyshev]

Yaron,

I believe, this is along the lines of general workflows around SF discussion that we had - there is a lot of stuff that can be part of workflow and everybody will have different approach. My take on all such features is in order to accommodate them, SF will have to have some sort of API on both backend (PHP, SMW) and front-end (URLs, JavaScript, REST).

All of this might be quite hard to develop.

         Sergey

--
Sergey Chernyshev
http://www.sergeychernyshev.com/

[Yaron Koren]

Well, I wouldn't really call this workflow-type functionality. Workflow, to me, is about people being notified when certain events happen, and being assigned tasks; it's not about emailing documents. Incidentally, I do find the idea of adding workflow capabilities to the system quite compelling: if there were a way to get email-sending to be triggered on certain events (relations or attributes getting added, changed etc.) that would let Mediawiki and its semantic extensions just about take the place of a lot of regular CMS's. Whether that code should be part of SMW, SF, or a separate extension is an open question.

As to whether everyone would have a different approach to such a thing, we'll see... so far in the development process there hasn't been an issue on which different people had needs that conflicted with one another.

-Yaron

[JeffreyStuckman]

Here's another bug: The last character is being dropped from some
fields when editing an existing page with "edit with form".

Example: Go to http://discoursedb.org/wiki/Special:EditData/Item/Race_has_no_place_in_Seattle_schools

Note that the "Stance:" field is set to "fo", even though it should be
"for".

Jeff

[Yaron Koren]

Thanks for that catch; it was what's known as a fencepost error, and it's fixed now. The fix will go into the next version.

-Yaron