[Cargo + Semantic Forms] Rendering Options - MediaWiki-l

22 Nov 2015

Hi everyone,

Yaron, the "[[Person:{{{Author|}}}|{{{Author|}}}]]" worked like a charm.
Thank you so much!

I'm trying to understand how it all works together and so far this is what
I gathered.

   - Forms glue a number of templates together
   - Each template defines its own data structure in cargo
   - When a form is saved it saves "hard coded" template calls on the
   "subject" page and the db data in the respective cargo tables -- one cargo
   table (or set of tables) per template.
   - The order and format in which this gets written in the "subject" page
   is defined in the form

If the above is correct the basic building block in this model is a
template, and if we want to be particular in how data is presented that
will dictate the templates and the templates will dictate the cargo tables.

For example, if in the authors table we want section A to be the author
birth and death dates as an info box, section B to be the free text of that
page, section C to be the list of literary awards to this author (including
date and work related to each award), and section D links to Wikipedia for
that person... then we need to create a minimum of 3 templates
corresponding to sections A, C (multi) and D.  With each of them having
their own tables in cargo.

*Question* 1:  Is the above correct?   Are there some examples of the use
of the *field *tag when using the cargo extension -- all fields seem to be
already rendered in the template that defines the cargo structures, so I'm
not sure when we would use the *field *tag.
*Question* 2:  What is the best way to take control of the rendering of a
multi instance template, like the list of awards, in the "Read" version of
a page?

   - Example 1: Defining the HTML that precedes all rows "<table>", is
   rendered with each row "<tr>"..."</tr>", and wraps the
series "</table>".

   - Example 2: Adding a label preceding the all rows "<hr
/>'''Awards:'''"

Thanks!
- Ed