Difference between revisions of "Template:DT Article Wiki (Intro)"

Latest revision as of 00:59, 23 November 2007

Here you define the wiki layout for your form.

• First, for some technical reasons, you MUST remove the two line breaks at includeonly> and /includeonly>

• Then replace <tt>Type? by the name of your Type. There are several occurences, so be careful.

• Now check the header (=the wiki table definition and the next line):
  • You can set table attributes like border, spacing and padding.
  • You can also define your own css style in Mediawiki:Common.css.
  • Set width to an appropriate value for the width of the first column (which contains the attribute labels).
  • Select a nice background color. It is a good idea to assign special colors to your most important DocTypes

• Then describe the fields. You have several degrees of freedom here:
  • You can leave out fields which occur in the edit form thus making them hidden. This may sometimes be useful for "technical" fields.
  • You can add fields with fixed contents or with dynamically calculated contents (like back references)
  • You can change the sequence of fields compared with the edit form.
  • You can paste the contents of two or more edit fields into one display field. This may make sense if the user understands that representation (say x/y pairs) whereas you want to be able to separate the values for XML export, for calculations etc.

• Define a field label. Often it will be the same as the the edit field name. But you can also use a field label which differs from the edit field name.

• Every field has a certain display type:
  • DT Form Field: simple field
  • DT Form Field Newline: simple field, contents starting in a new line (needed for enumerations which start in the first line)
  • DT Form Field Text: full featured field, allows also headings (which must be indented by at least one space, however.
  • DT Form Field Link: field contents is interpreted as a link to another object. If the name of the page where the referenced object is defined can be derived from the object name (or if it ios identical with the object name) you should make use of this relation here. If the connection between object and article is not that simple (i.e. objects of the referenced type a grouped together in articles of arbitrary name) you must care for the lookup of the article´s name. The Template "DT Link" will help you to find the article´s name.
  • DT Form Field Ref: field contents is generated by a query which looks for reverse links from objects of another Type to our current object

• Apart from displaying field contents in a wiki form you can also use fields to assign your articles to a category. See thge example directly after the form table. Adapt this line to your Type or delete it.