Overview

Displaying items to users has a couple of challenges. First of all the display of a single item can be different for each item_type (and even within a type). Second of all, the display of items within a section can be different from assessment to assessment. Last but not least, the whole assessment might be displayed differently depending on attributes and the type of assessment we are talking about.

Note: please refer to the discussion of Items here. That discussion complements the discussion here, and the data model graphic pertaining to the Item Display Types system is available there also.

Item Display Types

Each item has an item_display_type object associated with it, that defines how to display the item. Each item_display_type has a couple of attributes, that can be passed to the formbuilder for the creation of the widget. Each widget has at least one item_display_type associated with it. In the long run I think this system has the potential to become a part of OpenACS itself (storing additional display information for each acs_object), but we are not there yet :). Obviouslly we are talking cr_item_types here as well.

Each item_display_type has a couple of attributes in common.

Depending on the presentation_types additional attributes (presentation_type attributes) come into play (are added as attributes to the CR item type) (mark: this is not feature complete. It really is up to the coder to decide what attributes each widget should have, down here are only *suggestions*). Additionally we're not mentioning all HTML possibilities associated with each type (e.g. a textarea has width and height..).

In addition, there are some potential presentation_types that actually seem to be better modeled as a Section of separate Items:

Section display

A section can be seen as a form with all the items within this section making up the form. Depending on the type of assessment we are talking about, the section can be displayed in various ways.
The section display page will be made up of the following attributes:
Additionally each section has certain parameters that determine the look and feel of the section itself. Luckily it is not necessary to have differing attributes for the sections, therefore all these display attributes can be found with the section and assessment specification