Support for Drupal 7 is ending on 5 January 2025—it’s time to migrate to Drupal 10! Learn about the many benefits of Drupal 10 and find migration tools in our resource center.When you're using the quick edit module to edit a node author, I think the UX is not optimal.
Here's what happens (not optimal):
- Click on the node author
- Enter the username because you know Drupal and are 99.9% sure it's the value required to edit the field
- Wait that the autocomplete confirms the username exists...until you realize it doesn't work
- Hit save
Here's what *could* happen (bad):
- Click on the node author
- Enter the UID (if you know how to find it) because the help text seems to require that data, and not the username
- Wait that the autocomplete confirms the UID exists...until you realize it doesn't work
- Ask for help? Try the username instead?
Here's what I think should happen (better?):
Preliminary tasks:
- Change the help text to "The username or user ID of the node author."
- Make sure the AJAX autocomplete works both against the username or UID
Workflow:
- Click on the node author
- Enter the username or UID
- Wait that the autocomplete confirms the username or UID exists
- Hit save
Tested today after #2226493: Apply formatters and widgets to Node base fields got in.
| Comment | File | Size | Author |
|---|---|---|---|
| #16 | Screenshot 2022-04-21 at 15.42.48.png | 91.14 KB | Lendude |
| #16 | Screenshot 2022-04-21 at 15.43.01.png | 229.13 KB | Lendude |
| username.png | 34.06 KB | anavarre | |
| user_id.png | 30.23 KB | anavarre | |
| user_form.png | 30.15 KB | anavarre |
Comments
Comment #1
Wim LeersI agree — in earlier iterations, the UX was much better. I had added a custom widget, but people insisted to use the standardized Entity Reference widget, and this is the consequence. (We did that for good reason though: a lot of cruft was removed.)
However, this is a general problem, that doesn't apply only to Quick Edit, but becomes especially obvious when looked at through Quick Edit. Therefore I'm retitling and moving this to the node system component.
Fortunately, it's easy to improve this! :)
Thanks for reporting!
Comment #2
BerdirIf the UX of the default entity reference widget is bad, then we shouldn't add a new one but try to improve that :)
Looks like we have multiple issues.
- The description being bad. Yeah, agreed, should be easy to improve once whe know what to write. Suggestions welcome.
- Autocomplete not working in quickedit. This apparently *is* a quickedit specific bug, it works fine when editing normally. Ca't see any requests going out, maybe the necessary JS doesn't get loaded?
- The old anonymous behavior. I'm not sure that really was better UX, but as mentioned above, instead of adding custom widgets, we should rather look into making it work better by default, so that other user entity reference fields work the same way.
Comment #3
Wim LeersExactly :)
Hrm, I'd swear this worked when I last did a full round of manual testing. But this should be easily fixable (as easy as changing the description): somewhere,
#attachedhandling is funky.All in all, very doable to improve this!
Comment #4
yoroy CreditAttribution: yoroy at Roy Scholten commentedComment #16
LendudeThis all seems to have gotten fixed/improved in the time since this was opened, see screenshots.
So closing this for now, feel free to re-open this if you think there is still work we need to do here.