More custom field revisions

[Sean McAfee]

"Jon Wilmoth" <JWilmoth at starbucks.com> wrote:
>*  Suppose the admin sets the Display Order for all of the fields to
>"1",
>   checks them all, and presses "Reorder Selected".  What should happen?
>Display Order must be unique within the product.  The cgi script would
>have to return an error indicating the display order couldn't be the
>same for all entries.

Better if the form can be laid out in such a way that it is impossible
to submit erroneous input.

>*  How should Bugzilla treat fields whose Display Order has been
>changed,
>   but which are not checked?

>It's a web based application.  The simple less-user friendly answer is:
>there are certain concessions made in the web world, loss of data input
>into forms is one.  We don't prompt the user to save bug modification
>(if any) when they navigate away from the page.  I say this is the same.
>Alternatively, effort could be spent to "protect" the user from
>themselves with javascript.

Unfortunately, as has been pointed out to me, the presence of Javascript
can't be depended on.

>Your modified cfadmin.html page appears to draw a distinction between a
>field's "name" and its "display label".  Why are two identifiers
>necessary?
>I envisioned that a single string would serve as both.

>The name is a admin/developer friendly identifier.  The display label is
>what would be displayed to the user.

I understand, but I just don't see what's gained by this approach.
In what way is an additional label like txtCustomStringField1 "friendly"
to the administrator or developer?  In what situations would it be used?

As an administrator, I would find it very confusing to have to supply two
names for every field and selection value, when all I really care about is
what's presented to the user.  What kind of interface did you have in mind
for specifying label pairs for selection fields?  Side-by-side textareas?
Or a single textarea, one label per line, with a reserved character
separating the "developer" label with the "user" label?  It seems needlessly
complicated.

Regarding your new cfadmin.html page, it seems very unintuitive to me.
I can't easily tell what functions are served by most of the form
elements.

There are four "broken image" icons to the left of the selection box in
the "Display Order" column; they refer to images that don't exist in my
2.17.3 installation.  So, it's hard to tell how one would alter a field's
display order using this page.

I'm *guessing* that the upper table is used for editing an individual
field, and that clicking the "Name" hyperlinks on the lower table will
reload the page with the chosen field at the top.  Is this correct?

What does the "Clear" button do?

I assume that the "Reorder Selected" button is no longer supposed to be
there.  I think it would be better to dispense with the "Delete Selected"
button as well.  Deleting a single field is such a potentially destructive
operation to begin with; I don't think we need to facilitate bulk deletes.


-- 
Sean McAfee -- etzwane at schwag.org