Pointers can have one or more items in them, and each item "points" to another card. In the conference example, each item in the Pointer on the Session card would "point" to the User card of someone who took part in that conference session. This has several advantages over typing people's names into a regular text card:
- You can pick an editing interface to suit the situation (auto-complete, checkboxes, dropdowns, etc...)
- There's no markup required to link or include the other card(s).
- You can easily set the view of all the items in the pointer wherever you include it. Items will appear by default in closed view
- You can draw on the information in other places. In the example given above, you could then add to the formatting of User cards a Search card to find the sessions
In view mode, Pointers always have an "add/edit" link beneath them which you can click on to go to edit mode.
Pointer+editing
Table of Contents
Pointers have several different edit interfaces which may be set using the *input card.
To continue our example from above, assume you include a Pointer called "+participants" on Session cards. In that case, you can set "participants+*input" to be equal to any of the following input types.
list
In list view, when you start typing an item, Wagn will do its best to fill in the rest by listing the names of existing cards that begin with whatever you typed in (much like it does in the Search bar).
radio
A series of radio buttons, each representing one card. One and only one may be selected.
checkbox
A series of checkboxes, each representing one card. You can select as few or as many as you want.
select
A classic dropdown of card names.
multiselect
A dropdown allowing multiple items to be selected.
Pointer+options
Naturally, you usually don't want every card on a wagn to be in, say, a checkbox list or a dropdown box. Your Wagn might have tens of thousands of cards!
To narrow the options, we use a Search card named +*options. For example, if you create "participants+*options" as a search that finds all the User cards, then items in "Making Wikis Welcome+participants" restrict the options to User cards.
In list view, setting *options means the Pointer will autofill only with the matching results of the *options search. In our example, this would mean that if I typed "Ja", then the pointer would autocomplete with users' names beginning with "Ja". Note: Wagn does not restrict list view items to cards matching the search, or even to existing cards. *options constrains only the autocomplete.
In other views, such as "checkbox", *options limits the choices presented, which effectively eliminates the option to point to cards not returned by the *option search.
option labels
Checkboxes and radio buttons can have supplementary information next to each option. Let's say, in our example, that on our conference website we invite each User to share information about themselves on their User card within an included card called "+about me". And then we decided it would be useful to show that information on the Session card when editing our +participant Pointer. We can achieve this by creating an "participant+*option label" card and setting its content to be "about me".
