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Adding a reference with no content will block save button
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Description

Reproduce:

  1. navigate to a Wikidata Item.
  2. Go to a statementgroup, click edit
  3. Click Add reference (by accident or in the intent to add a reference but turn away from it because you don't know how to use it)
  4. Do nothing with the reference property field; you can do something else, like changing the value etc.

Screenshot from 2016-06-23 16-57-48.png (181×660 px, 16 KB)

Result:
Save can't be clicked even though the user may made actual changes, seemingly because the Reference property is empty.
This leads to potential loss of changes (since the user may have changed something else) if the user does not find the cause of the blocked save button.

What should happen:

  • If there is nothing in the property, the statement can still be saved (It should behave like "add qualifier" behaves after a click: )
  • And/Or there should be a notification why save is not possible to click/execute; highlighting the "corrupt" input field may also help.

Update

  • Initially, I assumed and checked that the qualifier behavior is different and wrote »It should behave like "add qualifier" behaves after a click: If there is nothing in the property, the statement can still be saved.«. However, on a second check I could not reproduce it anymore. Possibly another bug.

Event Timeline

Both qualifiers and references disable the save button if you select a property but don't enter a value. Should that also be changed?

Hi @Nikki thanks for pointing this out. Indeed, on a second check I could not reproduce the difference between qualifier and reference anymore and thus I believe that it should change in both cases. I assume if a user just clicked on "add property" or "add reference" and put nothing in, it is OK to save since (at least from the user's perspective, no actual change was done, except displaying an input field)

There are some related issues:

Another silent fail: T138312 (but after inputting a invalid value)
Hard-to-understand error message on invalid value: T138365

Also, this might enable the creation of "templates" without creating constraints . E.g. for books we could create the properties "Title", "ISBN", "Publisher" … and it would still work if the user does not know all the data.

Since most of the underlying UI code changes are merged, as far as I am concerned, we could continue to work on this one. The original proposal of not disabling save if an empty value exists, is still valid from my point of view.

Jan_Dittrich renamed this task from Adding a reference with no content will block save button (unlike adding a qualifier) to Adding a reference with no content will block save button.Sep 26 2016, 9:49 AM
Lydia_Pintscher triaged this task as Medium priority.
Lydia_Pintscher moved this task from incoming to consider for next sprint on the Wikidata board.
Lydia_Pintscher subscribed.