I’d like to require some fields on the ‘item submission form’ for anonymous users, but NOT for admins.
I CAN set the ‘required’ checkbox on metadata fields, which requires an anonymous user to enter their name, etc… but then I (as an admin) are also forced to enter a ‘submitter name’ when I’m manually adding new items.
It would be nice to add ‘required’ functionality on a per-role basis.
Hi @DTavres! Welcome to our user forum!
Your use case (collecting information about submitter in the Item Submission Form) is a very common one. We’ve been struggling to agree on a set of features that would better suit that situation without requiring more complex approaches that are found in Form plugins.
I think allowing a “required” field to not be filled in some situations would break its meaning. If a field is required we kinda can take for granted that it is filled in situations like the Advanced Search or when validating Bulk Editing and CSV Import. A similar path would be to create a separate validador (“Require on submission”). Then the field could be non-required but still trigger validation in the Item Submission Form. That would make more sense to me, I think we can open an issue to discuss that.
What bugs me a bit is that this type of request considers a scenario where you are storing the submitter information (not only name, sometimes email, address, etc) as an item metadata. And in my opinion your collection items should contain information that describes themselves in the archive, not really user data… that is more suitable for some kind of “meta” metadata. Such as the one that WordPress already has (author, in this case). But again since the submission is anonymous, you don’t have that, its a sort of contradiction.
I keep wondering if we go another path and offer a way to integrate a login/register form with the submitter form… this way you could collect user data, save it as the item actual author and give the user a basic user role, like “Subscriber”, who has nothing to see in the Admin-side but could then at least follow some status regarding its submission. The problem is that this tends to became a more complex area, people could start asking for custom fields and we would be entering in a territory that I feel is better covered by User Registration plugins.