The Meta Information Edit page allows a user to edit the parameters
of a displayed field. For example, if you click the meta link for the
Last Name field, the Meta Information Edit page is displayed for
that field. Editing the parameters in the Meta Information Edit page
effects the values that will be accepted for the Last Name field. You
could specify the width of this field, meaning the number of characters accepted,
as 30 using the Meta Information Edit page. This would limit the length
of any value entered in the Last Name field to 30 characters.
The Meta Information Edit field is displayed only to Super Users. Exercise
caution when editing this page.
Features
OK
After entering the necessary values, click OK. The following is a description of some of the displayed fields.
- "Widget Type" specifies the HTML INPUT tag type to use when displaying the
field in, say, the item editor.
- "Width" and "Height" only apply to some of the "Widget Type" options, for
instance the "Textarea" widget.
- "label" is displayed instead of the internal column name. For example, the
"category" column of the "products" table might have a label of "Product Category."
- "help" is displayed below the column label, and helps describe the purpose of
the field to the user.
- "help url" can be used to link to a page giving more information on the field.
- "lookup" can be used when a field is acting like a foreign key into another
table. In that case, you'll probably want to use some sort of select box as
the widget type, and if you want to reference multiple rows in the destination
table, you'll probably want to use a multi-select box, with "colons_to_null"
as the pre_filter, and "::" as the lookup_exclude.
- "filter" and "pre_filter" can be used to filter data destined for that field
or data read from that field, respectively.