Allow Pages databases to not have a "title" field

[Princess Celestia]

Pages databases currently require a field to be designated as the "title" field. We're looking to use Pages as a custom form tool to accept staff applications and in that context, making the submitter come up with a title for their submission is really weird and none of the other fields are appropriate for use as a title either. So any officially supported solution that lets us avoid exposing a "title" field to the submitter would be fantastic for enabling use cases like this.

Adding support for any one of the following would do the trick:

• Automatically generate the contents of the title field based on other information like the submission date and submitter's display name (ideally configurable but even a nonconfigurable automatic title would work).
• Designate the record's author as the title "field".
• Designate the record's creation date as the title "field".
• Allow a Pages database to exist with no concept of a "title" field at all (I understand this may be unrealistic from a technical design standpoint but hey, one can dream 🙂 ).

I'm sure we can hack our way around this by creating a hidden form field in a custom record creation template but considering this seems like an obvious use case for Pages, it might make sense to support it in the core product (titles also aren't obviously relevant to the "testimonials" use case that Pages is currently advertised for either). This will help position Pages as a well-integrated alternative for your customers to tools like Typeform, Microsoft Forms, Google Forms, Wufoo, and the like.

There are at least two past topics here from other customers trying to achieve something similar:

 

[Marc]

I understand the feature request there, and there are technical reasons its not that way at present. I would ask however, if they are for applications, wouldnt you be best to just rename the field to "Full name" or something similar?

[Nathan Explosion]

But it's already possible. Modify the "Title" field as follows:

1. Set the default value to be a space (that's important...very important!!!) or anything else of your choice...but it must be something.
2. Edit the permissions of the field - remove the "edit field content" and "add content to field" permission from the groups from whom you wish the title to be hidden.

Ta-da!!!

 

[Princess Celestia]

39 minutes ago, Marc Stridgen said:

I understand the feature request there, and there are technical reasons its not that way at present. I would ask however, if they are for applications, wouldnt you be best to just rename the field to "Full name" or something similar?

Asking for a "full name" is redundant in our case because the only name we need is a user's display name - and we already automatically get that through Pages knowing who created a given record. 🙂

16 minutes ago, Nathan Explosion said:

Modify the "Title" field as follows:

1. Set the default value to be a space (that's important...very important!!!) or anything else of your choice...but it must be something.
2. Edit the permissions of the field - remove the "edit field content" and "add content to field" permission from the groups from whom you wish the title to be hidden.

Ta-da!!!

That's a clever workaround! It feels very wrong to maintain a field with meaningless garbage data like that but it'll probably tide us over. Will have to see how <title> tags and such play out with this approach. Thanks for the idea!

Edited May 11, 2023 by Princess Celestia

[Marc]

15 minutes ago, Nathan Explosion said:

But it's already possible. Modify the "Title" field as follows:

1. Set the default value to be a space (that's important...very important!!!) or anything else of your choice...but it must be something.
2. Edit the permissions of the field - remove the "edit field content" and "add content to field" permission from the groups from whom you wish the title to be hidden.

Ta-da!!!

 

Very clever 🙂 Love it

[opentype]

10 hours ago, Princess Celestia said:

'm sure we can hack our way around this by creating a hidden form field

I wouldn’t call it a hack. It’s why editing the form is supported in the first place. The content of the field can also be processed via hooks or from the templates. Tons of options. But the average user will have a need for a proper title field, as this is what is shown and used as link in the ACP and on the front end. I doubt IPS will mess with that.