Displaying the template calls in a Spreadsheet Interface
In the second week of the coding period I moved on to the central task of my project ie. displaying the spreadsheet in the special page previously created.
Fetching data and creating the Spreadsheet Interface
At first I was clueless about how I should get all the pages which contain the selected template, but then I came across the templatelinks table which is part of the Mediawiki core MySQl database. The templatelinks table stores the page_id of each page that is made using a particular template. Thus using natural join, I fetched the page names of all the pages containing that template. Using natural join also ensures that we do not get any pages that have been deleted. The query used is: {{< tabbed-codeblock >}}
SELECT page_title from templatelinks INNER JOIN page ON tl_from = page_id; {{< /tabbed-codeblock >}}
After getting all the pages, I fetched the contents of all the pages and seperated the template calls from them and put the template calls in an array of strings. Then a function was used to fetch all the values from the template calls and put them in the global variable $wgPageFormsGridValues. The existing code of the Page Forms extension that uses the jsGrid library was used to display the values in a spreadsheet:
{{< image classes="fancybox right clear" src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dmytyofam/image/upload/v1528732302/spreadsheet1.png (opens in a new tab)" thumbnail="https://res.cloudinary.com/dmytyofam/image/upload/v1528732302/spreadsheet1.png (opens in a new tab)" title="Display template calls in a Spreadsheet" >}}
Getting the ideal input type for each field
The global variable $wgPageFormsGridParams was used to set the properties for each column (according to each parameter of the template). A PFTemplate object was created for the template and the getTemplateFields function was used to get the template parameters. For each template field the field name, field label(title) and input type were set using methods from the PFTemplateField class. Furthermore, to determine the ideal input type to display the field values, we first check whether Cargo or Semantic MediaWiki was used to store the data. We use the specialized functions getFieldType and getPropertyType for Cargo and SMW respectivley to get the input type and set the grid param values. It currently supports text, textarea, checkbox and date. If the input type is not suited for any of those mentioned above, we set it to text by default.
{{< image classes="fancybox right clear" src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dmytyofam/image/upload/v1528732302/idealinput.png (opens in a new tab)" thumbnail="https://res.cloudinary.com/dmytyofam/image/upload/v1528732302/idealinput.png (opens in a new tab)" title="Display template calls in a Spreadsheet" >}}
Saving the edits to the different pages
This task was a bit tough for me and I had to put in a lot of thought as to how I would implement it. There were two feasible options:
- Get the values from the submitted form and the contents of the pages to be edited. Then use a custom function to edit the page contents according to the submitted values. The new page contents are then saved using the methods already defined in the pfautoedit API.
- Another approach would be to fetch a form that can be paired with each template such that the form contains the template it is paired with. Then the pfautoedit API is called after setting the form and the target page.
I have successfully tested the first approach and am currently trying the second one. Even though the first approach can be used for more cases (pages not created using forms), it currently does not include the implementation for adding a new page and autocomplation (this is where the second approach might be useful). Thus, it is to be seen which approach will be more suitable or if it will be possible to somehow include the features of both the approaches.