Extension talk:Page Forms

Multiple instance forms for long tables
We are using a multiple instance template to add rows to a table. The table has 17 columns, so the form fails at around row 62 - assuming due to the php field input limit of 1000. This limit, along with the fact that loading time for the form get long after 20 or 30 multiple instances or so, suggests Semantic Forms may not work for this use case (managing large tables). We can't split information across multiple pages.

Could something like this work: a query-based display page (Cargo) that calls a single instance form for each row of the table, showing in a pop-up, so that each row is stored semantically as individual page in the background, but the person using the table never sees it. Maybe include a button/action in each row to "edit row", and another for "delete row". I think I can see how editing rows might work, I don't know about deleting them.

The goal obviously is a better UI for maintaining mediawiki tables. We can't use Visual Editor right now due to our custom skin. We would prefer to keep content stored in the wiki (as opposed to just pulling, say, Google Docs onto the page) so that we can use our draft/published control and permissions scheme (supplied by Ponydocs Extension).

Anyone have a magic solution we haven't thought of yet?

--Bgrenon (talk) 12:57, 13 April 2016 (UTC)


 * There's actually a new feature coming in SF 3.6 that might make the handling of large tables more doable - spreadsheet-style editing. 3.6 will hopefully get released in the next few weeks, so that might be worth trying out. On the other hand, I don't know how well it would display on the screen, with 17 columns. Unfortunately, there's no way to isolate a single instance of a multiple-instance template in a form. Why wouldn't the multiple-pages thing work? Yaron Koren (talk) 15:28, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

Undesired effects of query form on page title and section headers
Using a query form in a page started to have undesired effects after updating Semantic Forms.

I have a page Sandbox with the following code: = a = == aa == === aaa ===

The page title (first line in the page) is displayed as Spezial:RunQuery/QueryAuflage instead of Sandbox and the section headers are displayed as UNIQ70028b3423b19709-h-0--QINU a, UNIQ70028b3423b19709-h-1--QINU aa, and UNIQ70028b3423b19709-h-2--QINU aaa.

(MediaWiki 1.21.2, Semantic MediaWiki 1.8.0.4, Semantic Forms 3.6-alpha) LambdaB (talk) 12:58, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

Size in percentage for text input boxes?
This is admittedly a request, but would it be possible to make the size parameter for text input boxes to be a percent of the container rather than number of characters (or to have that option)?

The reason I ask is that I have such a pain trying to edit the CSS appropriately for these, especially if I'm trying to build multiple instance templates. Character numbers are quite difficult to work with for different browser window sizes or anything responsive. If I'm missing an easy trick, I'd love to hear that also of course.

Thanks for the consideration! --Joshkking (talk) 14:13, 16 April 2016 (UTC)


 * It would be nice if there were a way to do that directly, although you can instead use the "class=" parameter, and set the width in the CSS. Although maybe you knew about that one, given that you mentioned CSS. Have you tried this? If so, what's the difficulty? Yaron Koren (talk) 13:23, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

Multiple loading of SemanticForms Extension
During initial setup using index.php (when LocalSettings.php is absent), if you choose the SemanticForms extension, the setup will add two lines

The first line ```# wfLoadExtension( 'SemanticForms' );``` should not be included or it checks for certain things (version, flags, etc) that it should abort loading.

I encountered this issue

After I commented the first line, its work fine now.

Yoonghm (talk) 06:00, 17 April 2016 (UTC)


 * What setup process are you using? I didn't know there was a MediaWiki setup process that also added extensions. Yaron Koren (talk) 13:20, 17 April 2016 (UTC)

Enable links to forms
I followed the instructions of your example in the quick start guide exactly. This works great. After I altered the template as described in the 'enable links to forms' section, something strange occurs.

When you create a new book, the values of Genres are stored in the Authors field and those of Authors in Genres. Why is that?

--C Wagner (talk) 08:37, 18 April 2016 (UTC)


 * Where is the error - in the underlying wikitext, in the display of the page, or in the values stored by Semantic MediaWiki or Cargo? Yaron Koren (talk) 16:44, 18 April 2016 (UTC)