Title field with title-less data

[masterofallarts]

Hey everyone,

say I want to store invoices as pages inside PW, for later referral and storage as a scanned document, and to relate the items (themselves stored independently) listed on the invoice to the invoice.

Say I have a template for invoices and have to use the title field. Really, I don't want to give every invoice a name, title or other identifier - they come complete with the firm that sent the invoice, an invoice number and a date. These three really are enough to identify any invoice.

What to do with the title field? In my envisioned system, it is pretty much useless, but PW forces me to come up with a name for each invoice. Can I circumvent this? Can I somehow autoconstruct the title from the other inputs?

Thanks a lot for any suggestion!

[Soma]

Remove global flag from title so you can remove it from templates.

Name field is required, as it is sort of the "id" of the page that is needed to have.

[pwired]

Hi Soma, could you be more specific where in PW to remove this global flag from title ?

Thanks

[Soma]

Sorry, I assumed it is clear. In the field advanced settings. Go to Setup -> Fields, open title field and under Advanced you'll find the Global setting. Uncheck it and you can remove title fields from templates.

[MatthewSchenker]

Greetings,

As Soma explained, you can turn off the need for the title field. However, I would want to make sure this is a good idea.

If you ever need those pages for other purposes, you'll likely want the title. Also, the "title" can be anything (any field). It does not need to be an extra field, and the user does not even have to know that it's a "title." For example, I'm working on a site with separate pages for numerous retail stores. Stores each have a unique "store number," and I just made that the "title." The user does not know that when they enter the store number they are simultaneously creating a "title," but now I have that bit of information to use in my template code.

Based on your description, it sounds like your users are already building invoices through field entries. Maybe just use the "invoice_number" field as the title?

Thanks,

Matthew

[pwired]

Thanks for the replies. It's one of those tips for a newbie that would otherwise take a lot more time to find out.

[masterofallarts]

Thanks for your replies everyone. I'm sorry I haven't replied earlier - I forgot to follow my own topic.

@Soma: It's good to learn that turning off the global flag is an option, seems to be quite exactly what I need - and @pwired: yes, it's really not as obvious to me as it surely is to anyone more familiar with PW - would have taken me ages to find out on my own.

@MatthewSchenker: I would love to use the "invoice_number" field as the title! Sadly, it is just a string, and nothing precludes different vendors to produce identical invoice numbers.

If I could combine the fields "vendor" and "invoice_number" into the "title", that would be really great! Like a mysql composite key.

My gut feeling says that's impossible. But if anyone thinks otherwise, I would much appreciate hearing it!

So again, thanks to all of you!

[renobird]

masterofallarts,

I don't think this would accomplish what you're after, but just incase you don't already know about it...

http://processwire.com/talk/topic/2458-module-fieldtypeconcatenate/

[Soma]

To populate a field on save you can create a autoload module (see HelloWorld.module)

And do something like this 

$this->addHookBefore('Pages::save', $this, 'addTitle');
 

public function addTitle($event) {
        $page = $event->arguments[0];
        if($page->template->name !== "product") return;
        $page->title = $page->somefield . " " . $page->field2;
    }
 

[diogo]

Your code is a mess Soma

I did some corrections:

public function addTitle($event) {
        $page = $event->arguments[0];
        if($page->done) return;
        if($page->template->name !== "product") return;
            $page->title = $page->somefield . " " . $page->field2;
            //$page->trackChange("data"); <- is this needed? I got an error, and it worked without
        //}
        //$page->done = true; <- same goes for this
        //$page->save(); <- the hook is before save, so we don't need this
    }

[Soma]

Thanks diogo, yeah might some in there that is not needed. It was original from a repeater on page and done months ago so might not all right there for simple page, just edited it in browser quickly.

Edited my example. Does it work like this?

[diogo]

It works