Templating & advanced text formatting for note / custom fields or secondary data field

[TheStaticTurtle]

Hi,

I'm currently evaluating whether ontime would work for my workflow, and I've run into an issue.

Say we have 15 microphones that will be swapped between performers, I have a custom field for each microphone with the name of the performer using it for each event.
I would like to be able to display this in a table representation

I am aware that I can build a custom app and put it in the external folder. I have already played with this and have a working prototype, but a custom app lacks some features such as remote client identification & management and also add dev time to an already busy schedule.

I was wondering if it was ever considered to allow users to use template variables in notes / custom fields, and implementing advanced text rendering with (sanitized) HTML or markdown would be a suitable option. This would allow for a very high level of customisation.

A simpler option that wouldn't require changes this deep could be to add a "virtual" option to the secondary-src parameters that is present in most views and store a template in the URL

Thanks,
Samuel

[cpvalente]

Hi @TheStaticTurtle , thank you for taking the time to make this proposal

I think it would be useful to have a look at how the templates would look and how would they help with your issue
I also did not quite understand the virtual option, but it sounds interesting, can you please elaborate?

as for

and implementing advanced text rendering with (sanitized) HTML or markdown would be a suitable option

We have had several attempts at this and looked for user feedback. Our current decision is that we will not implement styling into the text in favour of building advanced data search and replace features.

[TheStaticTurtle]

Hi @TheStaticTurtle , thank you for taking the time to make this proposal

Thanks, I really like ontime, the v4 update made very useable for me, now it's mostly about displaying the right data for the right group of person

I also did not quite understand the virtual option, but it sounds interesting, can you please elaborate?

Well, instead of having templates directly in the field which would greatly increase complexity, it would be per-view and could use custom URLs. For example, with the operator view:

Let's say you go to this url /op?secondary-src=virtual&virtual-data=VGVtcGxhdGUgZXhhbXBsZToKe3tOb3RlfX0= (I used base64 here, but you could use more efficient methods to increase URL limits) the template for the secondary data would be Template example:\n{{Note}}.

We have had several attempts at this and looked for user feedback. Our current decision is that we will not implement styling into the text in favour of building advanced data search and replace features.

IMO, it doesn't really make sense to allow users to use a template without letting them style it. But I do understand that you need to prioritise something!