Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: XOWiki and Categories

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3: Re: XOWiki and Categories (response to 1)
Posted by Carl Lemp on 01/31/21 05:26 PM

Thank you Gustaf.
That definitely helps and is even better than the original XOWiki use of categories for my purposes. I have not looked at the form constraints yet but I will now.

In your post, what does the @cr_fields:hidden do? I looked in the documentation and found this:

    The form constraints refer not only to form.fields, but use a few 
    special field names starting with an at-sign for  other purposes as 
    well.

    @cr_fields: assign properties to all content repository fields
    For example: @cr_fields: hidden is a short form of
    _name:hidden _creator:hidden _title:hidden _description:hidden nls_language:hidden

    @fields: symbolic name for all user fields
    @categories: turn categories optionally off for form entries of  this form
    @table: specify, which form fields should be included in the summary table

but I'm new to OpenACS so that didn't help me understand it. The only use I found in the XOWiki source was in:

  form-usages instproc generate_voting_form

and that didn't help either.

Thanks, Carl

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4: Re: XOWiki and Categories (response to 3)
Posted by Gustaf Neumann on 01/31/21 08:06 PM
Dear Carl,

i've reformatted your posting lightly to increase readability.

Concerning @cr_fields: The term refers to the fields of the content repository, which are part of every content repository entry ("name", "title", "description", "nls_language", and also the "creator" field, which is defined in xowiki::Page). Since form pages extend these pages with arbitrary additional attributes, these native names of the content repository are prefixed with an "_" to allow same-named fields for extending as well. So, instead of defining in the form_constraints attributes for all of these fields, one can use the short-form @cr_fields. This is just a convenience for the developer.

The meaning of "hidden" in this case is, that when one edits such a page, the edit page does not render input fields, but hidden fields. If "omit" is specified, these fields will be omitted.

if you look for the source code, see e.g. "xowiki-www-procs.tcl", where the value of this entry is passed in `-field_spec`. Typically, this value is set in user-level forms.