An alternate approach to custom fields

[Gervase Markham]

David Miller wrote:
> On 3/22/03 10:03 AM +0000, Gervase Markham wrote:
>>>SortKey - Display order
>>
>>Where these have appeared elsewhere in Bugzilla, they have been a pain.
>>Why is it needed?
> 
> fielddefs already has sort keys.  It's used to define the order the fields
> are listed in when sending bugmail for new bugs.  That's not something new
> he's adding.

Fair enough. It's the UI for managing them that sucks; presumably, this 
would be (is) factory-set to something sane.

>>>Valexp - regular expression describing the valid pattern of input.  If
>>>null, no validation is performed.  (also overrideable at lower level).
>>
>>Again, I'm not convinced we need this (other than the definition of enum
>>types.)
> 
> I can see the use for this in general for strings....  say you put in a
> free-text version number field because you have too many versions to list
> in a popup.  Your version numbers are in a specific format that you can
> always recognize though.  You could use this to ensure anything entered in
> that field is actually a legal version number.

But what error would you throw if it failed? For it to be user-friendly, 
you'd also have to define an error tag; unless this was derived 
automatically from the field name... "<fieldname>-format-error" or 
something.

Gerv