An Overview of Term Lists

Description:

A term list is a limited set of terms arranged as a simple alphabetical list or in some other logically evident way. They are used to describe aspects of content objects or entities that have a limited number of possibilities. Term lists are sometimes also called controlled lists.

CollectionSpace has two different types of term lists available. This page describes these.

Term lists in CollectionSpace:

CollectionSpace contains two types of term lists. They differ in their implementation, availability, and performance as follows:

Dynamic term lists:

Dynamic term lists are editable via the CollectionSpace User Interface. Changes to these lists become visible immediately, or after a configurable cache timeout period. Dynamic term lists should be used when options are expected to change relatively frequently, or when non-technical users are expected to edit them. The lists are stored in the database, which means that they come at a performance cost. This cost may be mitigated by configuring CollectionSpace to cache the lists in memory, with the trade-off that changes to the lists will not appear immediately in dropdowns on forms. The cache timeout is configured using the termlist-cache-timeout setting, as described in Configuring Caching in CollectionSpace.

Static term lists:

Static term lists are not entirely static as the name suggests, but they are only editable by developers. They should be used when options are expected to change little, or not at all. List options are defined in CollectionSpace configuration files, and are not stored in the database. Using static term lists does not affect performance, but they are more work to edit, and a reload of the configuration files is required for changes to take effect.

How to change from one term list to the other:

To change a field from one term list type to the other, edit the CollectionSpace configuration file in which the field is defined (see unified collectionspace config). An example of a configuration for each type of term list is given below:

Dynamic term list:

Static term list:

More information:

About configuring term lists:

• About field types: HTML field level templates
• The file in which to make the configuration: unified collectionspace config
• Caching: Configuring Caching in CollectionSpace

About editing the contents of term lists:

• Dynamic term lists:
  How to add, edit and remove terms of a dynamic term list
  How to add a term to a dynamic term list