Symphony.

I really love the way how Symphony 2 allows us to pull data from other sections into fields with dynamic options. One thing I don't like is the way this linked content is presented: you can only select one field of the linked section to be shown and these leads into problems. Imagine a section with times of courses at university where you can enter a starting and an ending time. Furthermore, imagine the possibility that there are courses that start at the same but end at different times: If I link this section as a dynamic option I'll get a list of all entry but there is no way for me to distinguish between those periods starting at the same time.

Okay, I know someone will answer that I should just create a new text field in my times section, where I can enter the whole time period (e. g. 8:00-9:30) but hey: I don't like that as it is redundant. It's just the combination of the values I entered in my other two fields.

I think it would be great to have a different workflow for setting up dynamic options. I'd like to suggest a combination of select box and tag list in the field editor:

• The select box offers me a list of all section available as dynamic options.
• When I select a section I'll get a input field with all available section fields "as tags"
• I can now insert these section fields into the input field and arrage it in the way I want the content to be presented, e. g. {starting-time}-{ending-time}. Anything that is not surrounded by curly braces should be handled as static content.

Nils

Would this work?

Ah yes, it's quite similar.

When I understand it correctly, the only difference is that you suggested one configurable title per section and that I was thinking of not setting up the title in the section itself but in the section that is linking to this content. This way each section that uses a dynamic option could have its own custom display title which would be helpful when the same data is used in different contexts.

The reason why I'm hesitant to allow configurable option text is that it requires the developer to know the names of the fields in the chosen section, e.g. starting-time and ending-time.. or was it start-time and end-time? So the question is whether to sacrifice one developer convenience (ease of creating fields) for another (ease of creating data sources/XSLT).

I'm not sure what the best answer is yet, especially since these fields are currently in a state of flux, but I tend to agree with Nils - configurable option text would be useful enough to be worth the extra small effort while creating fields. This would apply to both select boxes and section links, and maybe tag lists' suggestion lists as well.