Question

For the application on our site it we use TwikiForms on the topics.

For a better user experience it would be very convenient if the user could enter/change information in the formfields without having to switch to edit mode.

We used to have a self-brewed plugin where you could enter information straight into a form and then hit "Save...". After that the application would update the formfields. Unfortunately, this plugin has stopped working since 4.1

Is there a working plugin that would allow more or less same functionality?

Environment

-- YogiParish - 17 Mar 2008

Answer

If you answer a question - or someone answered one of your questions - please remember to edit the page and set the status to answered. The status selector is below the edit box.

Have you had a look on UserCommentsTemplate yet?

-- FranzJosefGigler - 17 Mar 2008

I think I have done just what you speak of without any special plugin. All I did was create a custom html form and formatted a link/button that uses URLPARAMs to pull the values from the target TWiki topic's form into my html form. When the user clicks "save," the form posts the entered values back into the target topic's form.

The one down side of this approach I can see is that it does not have the kind of protection against conflicting edits real edit mode provides. For example, if I go to edit a form (so the values are loaded into the html form) but then walk away for a while, during which time someone else edits and saves, if I then click save on the form, my values will over-write the other user's and I'll get no warning about that.

-- LynnwoodBrown - 17 Mar 2008

Lynnwood, thank you very much for your answer. This sounds very promising. The edit conflict is not an issue in my application.

May I ask you if you could post an example here, a la cookbook. I am not very good at programming this stuff and I guess it would take me ages to get to the point where this works more or less.

(I also have a problem with the templates on my site, but that is part of another support question)

-- YogiParish - 17 Mar 2008

OK, you're the second person in 2 days that have requested a demo of this technique, so I've created one in Sandbox.ChangeRequest1001.

Hope this is helpful for you!

-- LynnwoodBrown - 17 Mar 2008

Looks like Sven has a brand new RestPlugin that also handles this and more. Very promising.

-- LarsEik - 18 Mar 2008

I use something like this to open the form editor without text edit area. It is not the same but seems a lot easier to me.

[[%SCRIPTURL%/edit%SCRIPTSUFFIX%/%BASEWEB%/%TOPIC%?t=%GMTIME{"$day$hour$minutes$seconds"}%&action=form][Edit form data]]

-- EnriqueCadalso - 18 Mar 2008

Enrique - the whole purpose of the example I posted was where you do not want to use the TWiki form as defined, for example to only display some of the fields. If you want to use the form as defined, of course it is much easier to do what you mentioned.

Lars, yes, i'm looking forward to using what Sven is working on. For starters, it would remove the need to refresh the page to load the edit form.

-- LynnwoodBrown - 18 Mar 2008