Forum OpenACS Development: Re: Title before name_method

first of all, according to the git history, this behavior is much older than the reform you have been referring to. The reform in acs_object__name prioritizing the title instead of the name method is some 21 years old: https://github.com/openacs/openacs-core/blame/719a4a4fe58dd082e7dccfaed805125337b10d41/packages/acs-kernel/sql/postgresql/acs-objects-create.sql#L767-L774

Similarly, the behavior concerning the title in acs_object__new is also quite old: https://github.com/openacs/openacs-core/blame/719a4a4fe58dd082e7dccfaed805125337b10d41/packages/acs-kernel/sql/postgresql/acs-objects-create.sql#L492-L502

In current codebase, for the name method to trigger, the object's title must be null. This won't happen automatically, given that we always fallback to the object type's pretty name + id. We could change that , e.g. let the title be null when not specified explicitly.

Another approach is to switch the priority when we retrieve the name, e.g. name method first and object title as a fallback.

Personally, I tend to prefer the first approach: we would store less data for those use cases where the object's title is not important, keep current behavior if the object's title matter, and give the name method a fair chance to trigger.

I am open to discussion, but as this has the potential to be a breaking change, we should consider if it should make it into the release or not.

Ciao

let the title be null when not specified explicitly.

Yes. this would help indeed. Though this would have to propagate through the acs_object.new function, which sets a default title.

Then the order would make sense - Use title if set, use object.name otherwise.

We would need an upgrade script which resets the title to "null" if the title is the default name set by acs_objects.new