Edit Taxon entry form

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1

We need to add a “YesNo2” to our taxon entry form, but it is not at all obvious how to do this. I can edit the collection object form under views, but where to edit the taxon form? Is this at all possible?

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2

The taxon form should be a separate form in the views however, you may find that you are using the default form which will be found in the global.views.xml file in the config/backstop directory rather than in your discipline-specific forms. If you want to edit it you will need to copy the view and viewdef across to your discipline-specific file so that Specify reads it from there.

3

Thank you! This smells of Specify6 though… How do I do this in Specify7?

Under Resources → View Sets → Global I found a “Common” file that defines the form amongst many other things. Do I need to copy this over to the Discipline branch?

4

You’ll need to copy the <view> and <viewdef> for the Taxon table from the global.views.xml file available in the Specify 6 repository on GitHub.

In Specify 7.9.3, we are adding an improved form editor that will no longer require you to navigate to these files in Specify 6 or in the GitHub repository!

5

You would not want to copy over the entire file to the discipline, just the <view> and <viewdef> of the form you wish to modify!

From our guide on Editing Forms:

common.views.xml and global.views.xml contain commonly used tables.

That is, they are tables that are shared by most of the disciplines. For example, the Accession table is in the common.views.xml file. Removing the status field from the Accession table will remove the field in the Accession table for every discipline, unless you copy over the <view> and <viewdef> components into your discipline-specific form definition before making changes.

The commonly used tables were not divided between the two files according to any particular rationale; therefore there is no way to intuit what table will be in either without checking.

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