Customizing Field Editor: existing plugins, ideas, feedback on my design

Hello,

With cascades, we have the opportunity to plus custom stuff almost anywhere. Thus, I would like to create specialized templates to edit my custom fields, ie a checkbox for a foss boolean field (for software tiddlers assessing if it is free and open source). This is useful, because I cannot always remember the values I use for booleans: true/false, yes/no, 1/0? And faster to fill of course.

First questions:

  • does a plugin already exist?
  • have you developed your solution?
  • is it something you are looking for too?

How to know if a field need a special rendering? A straightforward solution could be based on the prefix or suffix of the field name (creation_date, is_foss), but I wanted a more generic one, so I made it explicit by creating tiddlers for my “defined fields” located in the folder $:/fdz/CustomField/Definition/. So the cascade filter condition is :[[$:/fdz/CustomField/Definition/]addsuffix<currentField>is[tiddler]then[...]]

Then I used the defined-field-tiddler’s fields to define the field:

  • field_type: boolean, date, date-YYYY, selection…
  • selection: list of allowed values
  • range

The field_type leads to the rendering tiddler, ie $:/fdz/CustomField/Template/boolean

More questions:

  • What do you think of the design?
  • Could you help me with the css part for a smart integration with the current editor?

We are already discussing this here Need help with changing how fields display in editTemplate? - #2 by TW_Tones

This would be a good start: https://tiddlywiki.com/#Customizing%20EditTemplate%20field%20rendering

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