Updates:

On 22 May 2014 08:14, Jon Robson <jrobson@wikimedia.org> wrote:

I've been away from OOUI/VisualEditor codebase for some time and I'm
hitting my head against a wall trying to get anywhere with what seems
like a small task.

Firstly I'm having issues getting citations working at all on my
vagrant instance -
http://imgur.com/WZmEWXj is how they look when I load VE
despite looking like http://imgur.com/dGA3sLw before I hit edit.
(I gave up trying to develop this on my local instance)

This needed Parsoid to be restarted after the configuration had changed. Now fixed.

That aside, I figured I could easily add a 'reference' command to the
bottom of the menu that would load the ReferencesDialog which contains
the 'use existing reference' button
.

I figured it would be good to make this button open the

ReferenceDialog

and then explore a way of refactoring that so that

'use existing reference
'

could be used outside it or at the very least

a reference dialogue could

be opened and straight away switched to use

existing reference.

Which menu? The cite menu? Over-riding that seems like an epically bad idea, given that it's meant to be auto-generated. Or is there a different menu I'm missing?

Also, this is directly against the current UX design for the menu, and though I think it's probably a good idea and merits exploration, was rejected before.

P.S.: So apparently a story was written with this new design but helpfully wasn't brought up in the Monday meetings so I was totally unaware you were trying to do this. Sorry.

With this quest defined, I went into the code to work out how to do this.

I looked at ve.ui.MWReferenceDialog.js and got the command name
'reference' and added it to the list like so:
'include': [ { 'group': 'cite' }, 'reference' ]

Magically a button appeared so i got excited and clicked it, hoping I

would see a reference dialog of some kind.

Sadly this caused things to explode, and I'm unable to debug this in
any coherent fashion to work this out.

OK. What JS console errors did you get, if any? Can you describe what happened? Did you actually make sure that there's a defined action that the button corresponds to?

I've now been stuck for the past 2 hours and since I'm on GMT hours
I've been unable to find help on irc. I'm turning to you guys to work
out how I can take this further or if I'm going down the wrong rabbit
hole.

Help needed.
I see Juliusz is on IRC so I'm hoping he'll be able to help.

I would very strongly advise against trying to do delicate things like this which may well blow up horrible remotely, and then being surprised that they blow up. :-(

--
James D. Forrester
Product Manager, VisualEditor
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

jforrester@wikimedia.org | @jdforrester