I am very in favour of the ideas of introducing a wizard as alternative (or complementary) to some of the existing editors. Quite some users experience the metadata editor as quite complex, with too many fields that could also be managed automatically or keep a default value.
Some comments related to wizards:
- The wizard steps should not only be forms, it should also be possible to configure a suggestion service. For example when a user uploads a shapefile/excel, or adds a wms-service, a suggestion service can grab the file or capabilities and suggest some metadata to the user.
- No validation should be required, the combination of selecting a template + filling all required fields in the wizard steps should always result in valid metadata. The wizard designer should validate this when designing the wizard. This means, that when existing metadata is modified using a wizard, there is a risk of loosing modifications that are made in an advanced editor.
- The designer should have some freedom in designing the wizard screens by allowing to use either angularjs templates or groovy
- Metadata is not published to the catalog until the wizard is complete (all required fields have been filled)
- It should be possible to link to external processes like publishing a shapefile in geoserver
- The wizard definition is part of the schema-plugin and uses as much as possible of the existing form-config specification (a tab can be a step)
Regards, Paul