[SMW-devel] Thank you for recent(?) changes to property handling for recursive/embedded queries

[Alex M. H. <amh...@on...>]

Dear SMW Development Team, 

Thank you very much for the recent(?) changes to SMW's behavior
regarding how properties are treated when a page is transcluded or
embedded via a query: It offers a great deal of flexibility and allows
much more granular management of semantic data than was possible in the
past. 

I am not sure when this got introduced, but in my experience, up to
version 1.5.1 (or .2), pages containing embed queries (or transcluding
other pages) would still inherit properties from the embedded pages. As
of 1.5.5.1 (I am not sure whether the change was introduced before
that), this is no longer the case for ordinary ([[Property::value]])
properties. This is great news!

Also, I have noticed, but I have not seen documented on the SMW site,
that properties assigned via {{#set:}} (and its related functions) will
be inherited via embed queries or transclusion. Please do not change
this, it is a great feature! It provides a great deal of flexibility,
and now allows something which I (and possibly others?) have wanted to
do for a long time (I wrote to this list last August about a possible
feature/option like this): This behavior allows certain properties to be
"inherited" via transclusion or an embed query, but prevents that
behavior by default, i.e., for [[property::value]] statements. 

I have added a few notes on the talk pages for the "embed" format
(http://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Embedded_format) and the "set"
parser function (http://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Setting_values)
on the SMW main wiki, but you may want to add to the "official"
documentation that #set: values will get transcluded via an embed format
query or basic transclusion and that this can be overridden by enclosing
in <noinclude> tags or simply writing [[Property::value| ]] instead. I
think that this information could be useful on both pages;
alternatively, a pointer to the talk pages might help direct people
towards this information, which I would have found quite helpful as a
user with limited ability to look through the code to see why this works
the way it does. 

Again, I am very much enjoying the new (to me, at least) flexibility of
choosing which properties get transcluded and which do not; please let
that functionality continue to be available for future releases. Thanks!

-Alex

 
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