CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Discussed on IRC:

Feb 11 15:38:27 <dlobo>   hey davej_
Feb 11 15:38:33 <dlobo>   any chance u can work on a patch for
Feb 11 15:38:37 <dlobo>   http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,12159.msg52210.html#msg52210
Feb 11 15:40:04 <davej_>   Hi dlobo, thought you might kindly invite me to do that!
Feb 11 15:40:30 <dlobo>   dai'm so predictable open source involves a lot of begging/pleading/cajoling/threatening

Would be good if we could work in the option to have these show on Profile Searches. I think Eileen has provided some code for achieving the above, but would be good to have it in core. Do I need to go dig it out?

Hi Peter,

D'you mean per-field help text or per-profile?

We often want to display per-profile help text on a profile search form, which we do by modifying the template to include the profile's help_pre &/or help_post text.

Something to consider is that text appropriate for a create/edit form may not be appropriate for a search form. Having the option to include the text or not on search forms would go some way to addressing this but there may be use cases where different text is wanted for create/edit versus search forms. To achieve this, we'd be looking at help_edit_pre, help_edit_post, help_search_pre and help_search_post. Which is possibly overdoing it for per-field help.

Thinking back to requests we've had, I'd say:
(a) per-profile:
 - separate help text for search vs edit, or (slightly less preferred) option to include the edit help text on the search form, would be useful.
(b) per-field:
 - separate or optional help text for search isn't something we currently see a need for.

To avoid this mushrooming, since my original post was about per-field help text (not per-profile), I suggest we restrict this topic to per-field. I've created an issue for this: http://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-6004

We could get another topic/issue going for per-profile help.

And since we don't have a use case for per-field help text on search forms, I'm inclined to keep it simple and just add help_pre to civicrm_uf_field. If others have a use case for separate/optional per-field help text for search forms, feel free to post and contribute.

Dave J

Hi Peter,

Eileen indicated in that post: "I hesitate to submit it as a JIRA issue because it could have some unexpected effects on people who already had multi-functional profiles". I agree, I think it's a useful contribution best applied as a template customisation where needed. If it went into core than as Eileen and Dave G said, it would need extra db & form fields to indicate whether the text should appear on search forms. I don't see the extra complexity and time as worthwhile when there's a good solution out there already (Eileen's). But, as Lobo would say, feel free to contribute this!

The change I originally proposed, separate pre_help & post_help, is something that cannot be achieved by template customisation without very unpleasant hackery.

Regards,

Dave J