Formulator with lookup windows

Dear Developers

As Silva still hasn't a more general way to embed other Assets than 
images in to a Silva Document, most people use Code Sources to embed 
Flash or Quicktime movies into their pages. This method has one major 
drawback: the user has to enter the reference to the Asset into a 
StringField by hand. This is admittedly not very user-friendly.

The easiest and most flexible way to overcome this problem I can imagine 
would be the possibility to include a button together with another input 
field (e.g. a StringField) in the Formulator forms. Such a button could 
be used to open a special lookup window similar to the "get image 
reference..." button in the Kupu- and Forms-Editor.

I tried to do something similar using Formulator’s TALES fields. With 
TALES I added a button and some JavaScript code to the Title field. This 
did work together with the add-forms of my customized content type. Then 
I tried this approach with Code Sources, but here it did not work:

1. The HTML and JavaScript code is rendered in a HTML-encoded way and 
thus does not add any functionality Forms-Editor’s Code Source edit widget.

2. In Kupu the HTML and JavaScript code in not encoded and thus should 
be functional. But it seems that JavaScript is for some reason not 
executed when pressing the button - well nothing happens.

As another approach, I added an 'onclick'-attribute with TALES using the 
'Extra' field of a 'StringField'. The problems were as follows:

1. In the Forms-Editor the StringField could be clicked and the 
JavaScript command did open a lookup window. However I could not find a 
way to provide a hook for the lookup window to insert some string back 
into the StringField.

2. Again, in Kupu the JavaScript was not executed when clicking the 
StringField.

However, both approaches are not very clean. Therefore, I think a more 
general method to provide a way to integrate a lookup window using 
Formulator would be very handy and would greatly enhance the functional 
potential of Silva. Such a feature must include a hook for the lookup 
window to write the lookup data back into the form which has been 
generated by Formulator.

I can also imagine other valuable ways to use such a feature. For 
example it would be useful to create more advanced metadata items. The 
lookup (or data entry) window should help users to enter metadata 
correctly (in this case the HTML input element may be disabled - the 
only way to enter data is though the lookup or data entry window)..

Together with some appropriate CodeSources, this feature would enable 
user-friendly lookup of Flash and Quicktime Assets! No new content types 
would be needed and the Silva Document XML Schema does not need to be 
changed.

Maybe someone has already faced similar problems, and knows a nice 
workaround?

Best regards and have a nice-week
Sam

-- 
Samuel Schluep | ETH Zürich
Center for Organizational and Occupational Sciences (ZOA)
Unit Man-Machine Interaction
+41 1 632 74 24 | [email protected] | http://www.zoa.ethz.ch