Discussion: Customizable Individual needs Contributor inputs

[Harrison-Idornigie]

Problem

In the Individual needs module, it seems like the Contributor inputs are hard coded in such a way that modifications cannot be made. I was almost gonna start building a new module that fits our needs before i discovered the way it was implemented. this is not very flexible

Proposed Solution

To make this more flexible, I would suggest that the inputs be easily customized in settings with default values so that we can add or modify the analysis criteria based on our needs. I can work on this and make a pull request but i would like to know if that is the direction you are going with this module

Alternatives

No response

Additional Context

No response

[SKuipers]

Hi @Harrison-Idornigie This is a good question. This area of the IN module was created by Ross for our school, and I'm guessing due to time constraints it made sense to hard-code it at the time. It would be great if it was more flexible, so that other schools could make more use of this feature. In fact, I have some other plans in the works to make the IN page itself more customisable, so your plans would definitely be in line with making the IN module as a whole more flexible.

I'd be happy if you'd like to start working on this. One way to go might be to create a branch as a draft PR, so that you can add your changes and get feedback as you go, to help ensure it fits well with the core and will be merged. We're also happy to offer suggestions via Slack.

The options for each section could certainly be moved into settings, or even normalised into a table. At first glance, it looks like the categories themselves have been hard-coded into the gibbonINInvestigationContribution table, which isn't ideal but could be worked around (and serialsed, which is also not great, I much prefer JSON values as MySQL can work with them and they're less fragile). What do you think?

The main aim for these types of changes would be to introduce new flexibility while maintaining backwards compatibility for existing data, but old columns could be retained and phased out as needed. Feel free to be in touch if you decide to work on these changes!