contao/test — Issue #1156: load subpalette from select instead of checkbox
Author: importer
Created: 2011-11-29 07:26:25+00:00
State: open
Labels: backend, Feature

Hi Leo,

First, I must say the paletting system of TL is very flexible and enables developers to quickly create user friendly forms. :) But lately I find myself pushing the limits of TYPOlight's backend form configuration. For more complex backend forms, it is very common to have multiple selectors of type 'select', mainly to be able to load a small set of specific fields, depending on the selected value.

In practice, this easily creates a large maintainance obstacle when using more than 1 or 2 selectors, since selectors of type 'select' can currently only toggle _palettes_, and not _subpalettes_. The amount of unique palettes to maintain with only a few 'select' selectors will quickly run out of hand. Say you have 3 types (palette selector) and 4 subtypes (also palette selector), the palette names you'd have to specify would be:

type1subtype1
type1subtype2
type1subtype3
type1subtype4
type2subtype1
type2subtype2
type2subtype3
type2subtype4
type3subtype1
type3subtype2
type3subtype3
type3subtype4

This is a large amount of overhead, since in most cases the main goal of selectors of type 'select' is to _only_ load a small (but different) subset of fields directly beneath the selector when a specific value is selected. Most of the time, the 'main' fields remain the same throughout the form.

It would be very nice to be able to select subpalettes with selectors of type 'select' as well. Just like using the value of a palette selector for selecting a specific palette, you could also use a value of the subpalette selector to select a subpalette.

Apart from that, using only options as palette names may create conflicts when 2 selectors share the same value. Currently only 1 of that value will be used. It would be great to be able to load a specific palette when two selectors have an option selected with the same value: selector1->option1 & selector2->option1 loads palette 'option1option1' instead of just 'option1'.

I hope some of these ideas are possible to implement without creating backward compatibility issues. Thank you!

Greetings,

Michiel Leideman
Graphical User Interface Programmer
ID interactive

[Download the attachments](http://www.contao.org/tl_files/tickets/1156.zip "Download the attachments of this ticket")

--- _Originally created by michiel on November 11th, 2009, at 02:33pm (ID 1156)_