Feature - Recursive summary

Hi,

Right now summaries containing references are displaying the object id. It would be nice if you could show (a custom part of) the object’s summary.

On of my use cases is that I have a ‘generic’ entity object, which is linked to a specific object. The entity contains frequently used fields such as a label, description, notes, … However, the label is currently only useful for entity objects. Once referenced, the specific object just displays a number if I use the reference in the summary. So currently I’m kind of modeling this like a 1-on-1 entity relationship (or an inheritance from the OOP viewpoint).

Another solution to the problem: make sections reusable (templates), so they can be quickly added to objects. It would be great if they were referenced instead of copied. That way, when fields are added/removed from the section template, the referencing objects will inherit those changes. This is more or less a polymorphism solution (multiple inheritance, compared to OOP).

I’m not sure if any of this is also useful for different use cases. Perhaps there is a better existing solution to the way I’m currently modeling my object graph. I guess generating migration scripts and using the API is another option, but that’s a path outside the scope of the UI.

Btw, I’m really enjoying this application :slight_smile::+1:

Hi @dennisd,

thanks for your feedback and your suggestion. At the moment we do some work to improve the handling of object references. One of the things, I currently think about, is the summary string of objects. It is currently generated by the content of the object’s summary fields. If a reference field is defined as summary field, only the object id is currently displayed. If we would also display the summary of the referenced object, the summary string would be very long. Also if that string contains another reference field, you could build an infinite loop. A solution could be, making the summary string of an object configurable. So you could define a template string something like
Router #{{id}} {{fields['hostname']}} {{fields['location']['fields']['city']}}
, where template variables will be replaced by the content of object fields (or fields of referenced objects).

Also reusable sections with fields, that can be shared between object types are on our list of ideas.