[Semediawiki-user] Default page= functionality

[Neill M. <ne...@nl...>]

Hi.

I think it would be great if you could specify a default page for a 
property.

Here is an example of the usefulness:

I have a property of type Page called "Company History". This is where a 
person
enters the names of all the companies they have worked for e.g. BT, Avaya,
Symbian, Nokia.

Now at the moment when a person clicks on one of these it is a red link 
as the pages do not exist for each company that has been entered into 
the system. So the user reaches a dead end. Not very semantic!

Now if you had default=page set for the property, instead of a red link 
the user
would be taken to a page that then performed some useful query.
For the above example, the Company History property definition
would look something like:

This is a property of type [[Has type::Page]] 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Has%20type::Page>.
[[Has default page::Company History Query]] 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Has%20default%20page::Company%20History%20Query>

The Company History Query page would contain:

{{#ask:[[Category:People]] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:People>
[[Company History::{{PAGENAME}}]]
|? First Name
|? Surname
|? Email
}}

So clicking on any of the entered property values (Nokia, Avaya, Symbian 
etc) would
take you to that pre defined page. The query is run and hey presto - useful
information is obtained - all people who also worked for one of those 
companies :)
The site owner would just simply create the desired default page 
containing the query once.

At the moment I have to do this manually every time a person puts in a new
company. I have to go and manually create a page with the exact same
query. You end up with dozens of pages with exactly the same query in it.
Obviously this is far from ideal!

Would anyone else find this functionality useful and could help?
If so, please get in touch!

Cheers
Neill.