Eric Shulman's edit-list macro

[Bob Jansen]

I apologise to the group because I emailed Eric directly instead of going via the group. I attach the details of the conversation below for anyone who is interested in using this very useful macro.

My initial query:

I am trying to use your edit-list macro. I can get the pop-up list to 
display but when I select an item, its value is not stored in the field 
I specified.

<$macrocall $name="edit-list"
                        field="exhibition_id"
                        filter="[tag[Exhibitions]!tag[Index]]" />

No matter what I do, the field, exhibition_id remains blank but the 
pop-up goes blank a well after making the selection. The field is 
defined on the tiddler showing the pop-up.

Also, is there a way to display field data in the pop-up rather than 
just the title?

Eric's first reply:

Although the documentation says that the tiddler param will default to the currrent tiddler, this is not actually working at present.

Until I can fix this, you can bypass the problem by explicitly including "tiddler=<<currentTiddler>>" as a param.

Also, if you want to display AND return a field value instead of a title, then you can just add "get[fieldname]" to the filter param, where "fieldname" is the field you wish to display and return.  Thus:

<$macrocall $name="edit-list" tiddler=<<currentTiddler>> field="exhibition_id"

   filter="[tag[Exhibitions]!tag[Index]get[fieldname]]" />

However, if you want to display field values instead of titles, BUT still return the corresponding title as the selected value, use the "listview" param, like this: 

<$macrocall $name="edit-list" tiddler=<<currentTiddler>> field="exhibition_id"

   listview="{{{ [<value>get[fieldname]] }}}" filter="[tag[Exhibitions]!tag[Index]]" />

Note that the documentation for the edit-list macro currently not finished.  I started to write it a while ago, but got sidetracked with other projects.  Perhaps I can get around to completing it after I fix the problem with the default value for the tiddler param.

Eric's subsequent followup reply:

I've just uploaded a fix for the tiddler param default to <<currentTiddler>>.  You can get a copy of the updated TiddlyTools/Macros/edit-list from

http://tiddlytools.com/filtergenerators.html#TiddlyTools%2FMacros%2Fedit-list

With this fix, you can now omit the "tiddler=<<currentTiddler>>" param and just write:

<$macrocall $name="edit-list" field="exhibition_id"filter="[tag[Exhibitions]!tag[Index]]" />

One important note: when the "target" tiddler for the input field is the <<currentTiddler>>, typing into the text input causes the input to lose focus as each character is typed.

This is a known issue in the TWCore, and since my <<edit-list>> macro uses the TWCore <$edit-text> widget, it behaves the same way.

This caused by the way that the TWCore's "refresh" handler works: whenever the value of a field in a tiddler is changed, the display of that tiddler is automatically refreshed to reflect the updated value.  Thus, when the $edit-text widget (or the <<edit-list>> macro) is displayed in the same tiddler as the field that is being changed, it is also re-rendered, causing it to lose focus.

There are some work-arounds that are discussed here: https://tiddlywiki.com/#EditTextWidget

[Bob Jansen]

Thanks for the followup Eric, that is all working as expected. A very useful macro indeed!

bobj