Feature request: Improvements to the “on the fly” option for adding new taxonomy terms

[csbarrett]

Current Behaviour

AtoM provides multiple ways to add new terms: Users can use add a term via the Manage Taxonomy screen or they can create place and subject terms “on the fly” from the archival description edit page. Users can also add new terms via the relevant taxonomy page (e.g., subject, place, genre).

When users search the auto-complete drop-down menus in the archival description edit page, they sometimes add new terms through the “on the fly” approach when they are actually trying to find an existing term.

Desired Behaviour

No duplicate, incomplete, or erroneous terms should be added to taxonomies through the “on the fly” approach.

Possible solutions

1. Provide administrators with a setting to toggle on or off the “on the fly” method for all users (preferred).
2. Allow administrators to grant permissions for create new terms via the Manage Taxonomy screen but not using the “on the fly” method.
3. Provide users with a prompt to indicate a that they are about to add a new term “on the fly” and give them an option to proceed or cancel.

Context and Notes

The autocomplete drop-down interface is touchy and makes it too easy to inadvertently enter incomplete or duplicate terms. In practice, what happens is that users inadvertently add new terms when they are searching the autocomplete drop-down for a relevant access point. There is no prompt or "create" button or anything else to indicate that they have actually created a new term rather than linked to an existing term.

Version

AtoM 2.7.3

[fiver-watson]

Hi @csbarrett !

It's up to the Maintainers to handle these types of requests now, not me, but I wanted to share one more possible solution I had kicking around to the underlying problem - one that I personally think would combine well with your solution 1 as an additional protection when adding terms on the fly IS enabled:

I can no longer find the related old Redmine wishlist ticket, but here's a mockup (from 2014!) I found kicking around in my AtoM stuff:

With this approach, autocomplete fields would default to only linking to existing entries.

By adding a simple toggle, users would have to manually choose to change the radio button to "Add new" before they could create a new term on the fly. Otherwise, the field will only accept existing matched entries. This seems like a small addition to the end user workflow that in turn prevents many problems - a fair tradeoff, in my opinion, and one that could work on any autocomplete field that allows new entries on the fly (as you can see here, the example mockup was for an archival institution field).

If your Option 1 above (adding a global admin setting to enable or disable the addition of on-the-fly terms) was added, then when set to deny the addition of on-the-fly terms, these radio buttons could simply be hidden from input fields.

Just a thought!

[csbarrett]

Hi, @fiver-watson! That is a great suggestion, thanks for sharing.