Question

In "Edit More" when you try to change the parent of a topic, you have to choose the parent from a listbox. This GUI feature is great when the number of parents is 50 or less, but when it's hundreds, as is the case with http://www.program-transformation.org, then it becomes uinwieldy. Worse, with Netscape, the width of the popup window varies with the width of the longest topic, and so it becomes almost impossible to select some items, because as soon as the page comes up, it is overwritten by the next page. You have to do it to appreciate the problem, I think. I managed to do it with about 20 frustrating attempts. Surely it would be so simple to have an alternative, e.g. typing the name of the parent topic. That would keep us all happy.

• TWiki version: Sep 2001
• Web server: www.program-transformation.org
• Server OS: Sorry, not sure
• Web browser: Netscape 4.77
• Client OS: Solaris 8

-- TWikiGuest - 22 Nov 2001

Answer

The latest Beta has the less frequently used parenting bullet moved further down, so that rename etc can be selected before the page containing a big topic list has finished downloading.

You can change the oopsmore.tmpl template from a <select name="topicparent">...</select> to an <input type="text" name="topicparent" />

Just looked at your site. I had no problem with Netscape. Netscape sometimes has the habit to close the picklist immediately. If that happens scroll the page so that the picklist is near the top or bottom of the page.

-- PeterThoeny - 24 Nov 2001

Netscape on Unix or Linux has the behaviour described in the question - rather than doing a scrolling picklist, it does a multi-column menu that can fill the whole screen with a long list... Quite a pain... The original poster might want to try Mozilla, as I think it is available for Solaris and it now works well with TWiki.

Perhaps a pop-up window that lists the topics would be better, ideally with some JavaScript that lets the user type in part of a topic name to retrieve the parent name. However, that's a lot more work!

-- RichardDonkin - 27 Nov 2001