Hi,
Yesterday I was in a group-session about wizards. Draft conclusions here:
https://github.com/geonetwork/core-geonetwork/wiki/201503Bern-Group2—UI
We think wizards have to be simpler than the editor, like windows installers.The main idea is that users that don’t know anything about metadata (not even know metadata exists) can create records on the catalog.
What we discussed yesterday was some kind of user admin interface where you can visually define a workflow of easy steps as a decision tree that will end up on a metadata view of a newly created metadata with the decisions made. So each step is defined as a very basic form (a yes-no decision, a list of checkboxes, a select dropdown,…) and
after that step there is an action transparent to the user (select template, XSLT transformation,…).
So, with this admin wizard UI you can define the steps to create a metada of some specific kind or the steps to fix an editor completeness requirement. The idea is also to be able to combine wizards so you can call a wizard at the end of another wizard, like modules.
We can define a wizard were the user just have to select the type of metadata (, next), add title (, next), add description (, next), add thumbnail (, next) and upload some additional resource (,next) to have a full defined metadata. Or have another wizard where they can define a more complex survey with steps for bounding box, temporal extent, etc… Fields used here can be the same as in the editor, so we can use autocompletion and required attributes
The advanced editor will still be available for advanced users. And advanced users can also create wizards for special usecases too.
This strongly links to the creation of wizards to fix errors on the editor, fix completeness errors, etc… With just a couple of fields you can apply and XSLT transformation that fixes anything.
The wizards, as decision trees, will be able to show different options depending on previous options selected. All this workflow thing can be defined on xml + auxiliar xslt files, so the main difficult thing here may be the ui, which can come at a later stage.
For me is important that a combination of a wizard with a certain template always creates valid metadata, so metadata validation can be hidden for basic users.
Also fields should take sensible defaults, the wizard should check the shapefile/xsl/pdf and extract usefull metadata like filesize, bounds, format, name. Uploading of a file should be the first step in many wizards.
What do you think?
Regards,
María.