Feature Proposal: Automaticly include header and footer in TWikiApplication

Motivation

With TWikiApplication based on TWikiForms, a header is often needed in order to show at a glance the form's values (ie META:FIELD ).

For example, in the Support Web, every support request includes the SupportHeader topic : %INCLUDE{SupportHeader}%. The AskSupportQuestion topic uses WebTopicEditTemplate as a "templatetopic" in order to the line %INCLUDE{SupportHeader}% being finally inserted in every new support request's topic.

This is not easy for TWiki beginners and you can't easily add a header after the topic is created. Newcomers to TWiki could write code for a twikiapplication and not add the %INCLUDE{SomeHeader}% in the "templatetopic" from the start. Later on, when a header is needed, they will have to edit ( sed/a ..) a lot of topic in order to add %INCLUDE{SomeHeader}% at the right place.

Description and Documentation

I hope this improvement could help in refactoring or build new twikiapplication.

I suggest that we don't any more have to use %INCLUDE{FooBarHeader}% in form based topics : with a form called for example, "FooBarForm", attached to your TWikiApplication's topics (FooBar-00001 ... FooBar-00564 ), any topic having the form "FooBarForm" attached, would be displayed with the header "FooBarHeader"(if exists) and the footer "FooBarFooter" (if exists). No more INCLUDE..

This feature could be activated/desactivated in the "FooBarForm" topic using :

• Set FORM_HEADER = "FooBarHeader"
• Set FORM_FOOTER = "FooBarFooter"

Examples

• http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Support/SID-00564?raw=on
• SupportForm
• SupportHeader

Impact

TWikiApplications.

Implementation

-- Contributors: OlivierThompson - 2009-11-01

Discussion