How to delete standard fields, or hide them thoroughly?

[Catharina Williams van Klinken]

Flex is full of fields that I never use. Can anyone tell me how to permanently remove these standard fields, or hide them so deep that nobody can find them except myself? I know you can hide fields, but my staff still find them when they 'unhide' fields to show lesser-used ones, and then accidentally enter data into them, and these unwanted fields greatly complicate the dictionary setup and the list of columns to display.

If this is not possible, then I ask that it become a high priority for a new version of Flex.

[asi...@yahoo.com]

From what you wrote below, it looks like you have looked up “Show Hidden Fields” in the Help menu and understand how all that works. I highly doubt any normal user can permanently delete a standard field, but that would be interesting to know. I can only see chaos coming from that. The people I have working on data are not supposed to unhide the hidden fields. We just insist on that during training and it seems to work.

 

Maybe a solution here to prevent people from doing what they were told not to do would be something like Paratext where administrators have the authority to restrict what people work on. So administrators could restrict which fields people work in without having to delete fields. Something similar could be built into FLEx, but I’m sure that is quite complicated and might even lead to other unforeseen problems or complications.

 

Crockett

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[Andreas_Joswig]

The functionality that Catharina is asking for was provided by WeSay, an application that was basically using a FLEx database, but that allowed the superuser to configure the data entry in a way that only certain fields were visible at any given phase of the work. This was precisely done to deal with the problems that Catharina writes about.

Unfortunately, WeSay is no longer supported, but a replacement seems to be on the horizon in FLExLight. This has a similar functionality, and I think it is approaching the Beta testing phase. Watch this space!

Andreas

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[Beth-docs Bryson]

Another thing that is new in the Beta of FW 9.2. (current version: 9.2.5) is that it is now possible to reorder the fields in the UI.

If you right-click on a field label, the context menu now has the option “Move Field”, with choices for “Up” or “Down”.

This is a brand new feature, and it wouldn’t surprise me if there are issues with it—this is why it is released in a beta version rather than a stable version.

A couple comments about it:

 - It does interact with Send/Receive.  At the moment I can’t remember if one user’s configuration gets sent to the other users on S/R or not.

 - In order to move fields, you first have to “Show Hidden Fields”.  This is because it would be hard to figure out the best behavior if you a moving a visible field above or below a hidden one.

 - You can only move fields within their part of the hierarchy.  That is, you can’t move a Sense-level field to the Entry level, or an Entry-level field to the Sense level.  Similarly for other clusters, like Pronunciation, Etymology, Example Sentence.

If you are someone who is comfortable with Beta-level software, and you want to try out this new functionality, please do send feedback to the developers (e.g., via FLEx_...@sil.org) about what does or doesn’t work for you with this new feature.  During the Beta phase is the best time to get that kind of feedback.

I don’t know if this will solve Catharina’s problems, but it might help if she can at least move the unwanted fields to the bottom of their cluster.

-Beth

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[Catharina Williams van Klinken]

Thank you all. I'll try the re-order fields option. It will at least help make the screen more logical for us.

Part of the complication is that we have 3 gloss languages (English, Portuguese and Indonesian), which makes a lot of fields. We also have a lot of our own fields (such as alternative spellings), some of which we hide most of the time. The clutter really gets to me, and to my staff.

I still look forward to super-users being allowed to at least deeply hide fields so they are not seen in any menu unless we turn them on again. It would save us hours and hours of searching and frustration.

With warm regards from Timor,

Catharina