How to configure summary fields

This is an older document that requires substantial revision to be brought up to current documentation standards. Some of the instructions in this document are also outdated and require modification.

It is included here as a placeholder, even prior to being revised, as an experienced CollectionSpace implementer may yet be able to obtain the information they need by carefully parsing this document.

reviewed by chris M

probably could do with some more structure to teh doc

This is a set of general notes that might be used as material to improve an existing document, as well as to create a second, new document:

The first set of notes appear to pertain to the existing document How to change the columns in the search results, and might be used as material when editing that document.
The second set of notes might be turned into a new document on "How to change the fields whose values appear in record titles" (or the like).

The Summary Fields page notes that CollectionSpace has multiple "'summary' instances, including page headers, sidebars, search results, and secondary tabs."

Depending on which of those summary contexts you're interested in, there are several ways to configure which field values appear in these places.

Here are two common places where you may wish to configure summary fields.

Changing which fields appear in the one-line summaries of records that appear in the sidebars, in search results on Find and Edit; in the lists of recently updated records on My CollectionSpace, etc.

1. In the app layer, you can apply the "mini"=..." attribute on any field's tag to designate where and when that field should appear in summary lists. For more information on that, including how you designate which summary lists that field should appear in: cspace-config Fields#mini

2. You make this change by editing your field, within your record type of interest, in the app layer's configuration file for your tenant within which you'll be making your customizations. When you look at this file, you can spot existing fields that have been designated as summary fields, and just follow the same pattern. (If you're changing which fields appear in a summary, you'll also want to *remove* the appropriate "mini=..." attribute(s) from the fields which will no longer appear in various summary lists.)

3. Where is the app config file: config info

4. Related to this, in the services layer, you can help reduce 'fan out' - the number of calls the app layer needs to make to the services layer - and thus improve performance when returning lists in the sidebars and search results, by making sure that same field is also routinely returned in summary lists of records.

(Notes TBA on this; it's configurable now for certain record types via the services' tenant bindings files, and we have an active JIRA to make this configurable for all record types; for certain record types, at present, you'll need to edit code.)

Changing which fields' values appear in a large font at the top of each record (the so-called "titlebar" area):

1. In the app layer, you can no longer apply the "in-title=yes" attribute cspace-config Fields#intitle this has now been deprecated and the UI no longer supports it

2. In the UI layer, you can designate which field has changes to its value dynamically reflected in the titlebar area by editing a .json configuration file for the appropriate record type. Do this by cloning the default configuration file for your record type of interest, src/main/webapp/default/config/(yourrecordtype).json, to your own tenant's folder; e.g. src/main/webapp/tenants/(tenantname)/config/(yourrecordtype).json.

3. Then you'd edit the value of the ""options": ?( fields:" sections in the "titleBar" block.

4. Activate your changes to the app config: unified collectionspace config#ActivatingyourchangesintheUI