Expose description node on some lookups

Submitted by Guest on Mon, 29/02/2016 - 06:31

Implementation discussion

On some lookups, it would be useful to change the description node from being hidden/derived to non-hidden and non-derived.

I have done this in our system by modifying the lookup.productGroup archetype so that what was:

is now:

[As you can guess these groups are used to aide in 'what to stocktake' and 'what prices to check'.]

I would suggest that any lookup used as a classification mechanism could usefully have its description note available for documentation purposes. As well as the Product Group, the other candidates are: Contact Purpose, Custom Payment Type, Customer Account Type ... In fact, I don't think that there is a downside in adjusting all lookup archetypes so that the description node is available for documentation purposes. In my tweak, I left the description node as minCardinality="1" - ie mandatory - I suspect that this is should not be the general case.

Regards, Tim G

Re: Expose description node on some lookups

Submitted by tanderson on Mon, 07/03/2016 - 20:41.

They would need to be optional; making them mandatory might break migration from other systems that don't provide any description.

Meaning default values would need to be provided for the base.xml and/or setup.xml files in the the release distribution for each archetype that is loaded.

Re: Expose description node on some lookups

Submitted by tgething (not verified) on Tue, 08/03/2016 - 05:25.

Agreed on both points. I looked at the setup and base xmls - not a big job. We should also tweak the 'show all' admin|lookups screen to show the description as well as the existing type and name.

Recommendation: create a JIRA but do nothing for the time being - ie park the idea for the moment.