Extension talk:Page Forms

Clicking form edit on page with 100s of template calls results in blank page timeout error
I have a page that uses a pageform to add multiple template calls (which people hold a certain role, in my case). This form worked for a while, but as the size of the wiki has increased, one page now calls over 300 templates. When I click "edit with form" on that page, I just get a blank page. The php log tells me [02-Jul-2020 10:17:26 America/Winnipeg] PHP Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded in /home/.../extensions/PageForms/includes/PF_AutoeditAPI.php on line 1061 If I remove a bunch of the template calls from the page temporarily it works again, but still is very slow to load (>20s).

I realize that one answer to this would be to redesign the data structure how we store this, but that would require edits to hundreds of pages, so I would prefer not to go that route.

Is there a way to make this quicker? Short of that, is there a way to at least get an explicit error rather than a blank page? Or, if on most wikis pageforms breaks at a certain page size, push an error when that is reached and revert to a plain edit? My temporary work-around is to ask people use a plain edit for the page. I might be able to remove the form edit tab from just the big roles. In any case it introduces weird exceptions in the use of the wiki which is lowering acceptance. The whole reason I have them edit this directly is because I have not found a solution for an earlier problem, https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension_talk:Page_Forms/Archive_January_to_March_2020Tenbergen (talk) 21:57, 2 July 2020 (UTC)


 * This might help with the blank page thing. Beyond that, I don't know - there's always going to be a limit, no matter how fast the code is. Yaron Koren (talk) 01:26, 3 July 2020 (UTC)


 * I realize we are doing something strange there, but wanted to make sure it's just legitimate resource depletion and not some bug. I had a look at the link you gave, and an increase in the php execution time allows the page to load. It takes more than 30s, so clearly isn't really a solution, but it's much better than a blank page. Is there a way to block the edit with page explicitly on a single page that uses a template that otherwise has a designated form? Tenbergen (talk) 21:00, 9 July 2020 (UTC)

Using #autoedit from inside a form instead of inside a page
The following is copied from an archived version of this page since no edits should be made there. --- I have written an #autoedit tag to update a page. The tag works as expected when I call it from another page. However, I would like to use the tag from a Form page instead of a page in the regular namespace. When I try to use the link from the form page, I get the error Modifying failed. No form specified. Will try to find the default form for the target page.

No target page specified. The code for the autoedit tag is: Is it possible to use this tag from inside a form and I have the syntax wrong, or is it simply not possible to use this from inside a form?


 * That sounds like a bug. But why include #autoedit in a form? It seems strange to modify a page while in the middle of modifying a different page. Yaron Koren (talk) 03:48, 13 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Sorry, lost sight of this problem. I have a wiki with pages for people and pages for their roles. When I set it up, I pondered if the information about who holds a role should be on the role page or the person page, and decided to put it on the role page. When we first built it that made sense, but of course now, the process is such that a new person arriving will lead to them being in several roles, so each role page would need to be edited to add the person. To make that process a little more straightforward I wanted to add links in the person form to start editing the relevant roles in a different tab. The more elegant solution would be to redesign things to store role holding in the person pages, but that would mean changing hundreds of pages. So that's the use case, but I am open to a different solution to the problem. What I have done for now is provide a cargo driven table that generates a link to edit a given role page, but it doesn't actually generate the required template call to add the current person. The autoedit link I was trying to set can do that, but only from a main page not a form page. As a tangent, some of the role pages are getting big (one has 353 template calls now to add a person to that role) and the page form that opens it now times out. I have started a talk section about that separately, but mentioning it here because this is the reason I came back to the problem today: my work around of a link to a form edit of the page no longer works for some of the roles. Tenbergen (talk) 15:15, 2 July 2020 (UTC)


 * It does sound like storing this information in person pages would make much more sense. I guess I would recommend doing that... Even if it involves editing hundreds of pages, it might only take a few hours to do. Granted, it might not be a pleasant few hours.
 * Also, does this information need to be stored in multiple-instance templates? Can it be done with just a field holding a list of values instead? Or is there more than one column of data involved?
 * Anyway, if you're not going to change the data structure, what I would recommend is to put the #autoedit link into the person template, not the person form - that will work better, and seems less confusing to users also. Yaron Koren (talk) 03:19, 10 July 2020 (UTC)


 * I have proposed the edit-everything solution, but for now the consensus seems to be that that cure is worse than the condition of having to edit that single page without form. We are also discussing some alternatives that would not be mediawiki or even data structure related, so won't go into those.
 * It might not need to be a multi-instance template, but I can't even imagine what that would look like. Can you tell me of a sample form that does that? It is only the role name and the person name that are involved. I might need to tweak how I set them up, but that would only be template edits and not editing every page.
 * We use the form to drive our onboarding workflow, so putting the #autoedit in the page instead of the form would not work well with that. Putting the role holding on the person page rather than the role page would work with that. Maybe that's really what we are going to have to do.
 * I still don't understand why the #autoedit doesn't work from a form, though. I had thought of forms as just special kinds of pages. Does #autoedit only work for Main namespace pages, then? 104.246.134.43 19:23, 16 July 2020 (UTC)

Default not working in PF 4.9.4
I think I stumbled on a new parsing issue. I have a form for adding multiple-instance templates. Users can add new instances by doing a search first (outside the form) and click the wanted item. What happens next is that the user is sent to the form with the wanted item listed in the url. The form reads the URL parameter and adds it as a default value of one of the form fields. If the user clicks "another instance" (or whatever label it is), that field is automatically filled with the item mentioned. Since the latest version (PF 4.9.4), however, this is no longer working: the field remains empty. Cavila 13:27, 12 July 2020 (UTC)


 * What's the structure you're using for the URL query string? Yaron Koren (talk) 02:15, 13 July 2020 (UTC)


 * It's always a variation of ? &template-name[template-parameter]=. That PF-style format isn't strictly necessary for the final bit because I'm using the URLGetparameter extension to grab the URL string and the Variables extension to pass the values to the "default" in Page Forms. But the output of the variable has not been the problem. It's the fact that Page Forms doesn't pick it up any longer. Cavila 08:02, 13 July 2020 (UTC)

Field missing from leaflet input type
The leaflet input type used to have two fields, one being a field for holding the coordinates, the other an input for searching places and showing the most probable match on the map. The latter appears to be removed in PF 4.9.4. Was this intentional? I thought it was pretty useful even if it ignored other possible matches for one's search. Cavila 13:38, 12 July 2020 (UTC)


 * Are you sure about this? I thought it was always only "googlemaps" that had this second input. Yaron Koren (talk) 02:16, 13 July 2020 (UTC)


 * I am. The leaflet input had it as well. Cavila 07:44, 13 July 2020 (UTC)


 * What version were you running in which the leaflet input had this field? I can't find any evidence that it ever did. Yaron Koren (talk) 19:08, 13 July 2020 (UTC)


 * PF 4.7 has the input with class="pfAddressInput" and placeholder="Enter address here", with a button-type input saying "Calculate coordinates using address". Cavila 08:13, 14 July 2020 (UTC)


 * Ah, yes! Thanks for pointing this out, and sorry for the problem. I just checked in a fix for this. Yaron Koren (talk) 03:00, 15 July 2020 (UTC)


 * Thanks! Cavila 20:49, 17 July 2020 (UTC)

Tokens getting removed after an aborted edit (PF 4.9.4)
I hope I'm not getting you all worked up but there's one more, slight thing. Something seems not to be working correctly with tokens in PF 4.9.4 (a newer Select2 library I guess). If you double-click to edit a token and then having second thoughts, you click outside the field, the token disappears. Sometimes hitting enter after editing the text of a token also results in its removal. Cavila 13:52, 12 July 2020 (UTC)