Having table views in 10.2 will be nice. I'm wondering though: will we ever see additional metadata types, such as checklists, radio buttons, action buttons etc.? What about being able to hide/show fields based on conditions, similar to Forms?
What we're finding in our projects is that, for anything beyond simple processes, users feel very constrained by limited repository metadata types. So we're having to build them custom interfaces using Laserfiche Forms. The simplest example is an approval. People find it a lot more natural and semantically appropriate to click buttons that say "Approve" or "Reject" rather than picking "Approved" or "Rejected" from a dropdown field that says "Approval". The latter feels like forcing a square peg into a round hole.
The entire spiel of Laserfiche these days is "Business Process Management", and the server-side functionality for that is great. I think the UI options and the overall UX in the "core" system (i.e. the repository) haven't really caught up though. Forms is nice, but it segregates the system since you can't natively send documents from the repository to Forms. Maybe this is why BPM Server was planned at one point, but that seems to have gone sideways, at least for this release.
What I'd love to see in Laserfiche metadata:
- Checklist fields (that let you do things like enforce a certain order or enable/disable individual checkboxes)
- Radio button fields
- Sliders (for number fields)
- Input groups
- Field descriptions/instructions above/under the field (like in Forms)
- Toggles
- Buttons
- Advanced dropdown elements (dividers, headers, being able to disable certain dropdown items)
- Progress bars
- Informational text areas (like alerts)
The logic for some of these already exists in LF Server. For example, a radio button is just another way to select one of multiple options - just like a dropdown field. Similarly, the "slider" in the above list would just be a front-end control for Number fields.
So yeah, I guess my question boils down to this: are there any plans to "modernize" the repository metadata structure and allow different options of interacting with it?