I've been using the ECA VBO plug-in and the ECA Content (Entity: Set field value) plugins to allow editors to modify the review status of content. This works great for adding a "review status: needs review" for a field but once done I wanted a way to clear the review status to return it to the previous state. I thought this wouldn't be too difficult, but...
After trying "Set and clear previous value" and "Set and enforce clear previous value" with an empty field value and attempting to use the "undefined" method (I couldn't see any documentation which would tells me whether the latter exists to mean that the method is undefined, or if it is a method for setting the field value as undefined) - it seems there is no way to unset a field value. I asked on slack if anyone knew how.
It turns out that, apparently unsetting, values (except for removing specific entity references), or setting the value to null aka empty is not supported!
This seems like an oversight given the ambitious scope of the ECA module. If you can't undo the kinds of transformations that are supported, it leaves you with an incomplete system, frustration in the assumption that you're doing something wrong and eventually looking for more complicated approaches which defeat the purpose of using ECA in the first place.
I don't know which would be better interface solution but here's the two ways I could see this working:
As far as I can see an empty field value seems to currently be interpreted as "do not change existing field value" even when the method includes the words "enforce clear previous value" so perhaps an additional method may be necessary if we want to people's existing models which may rely on this fallback, suddenly having a change in behavior due to an update/patch.
If however we agree that "enforce clear previous value" will already be interpreted by most people as doing what it says then perhaps this could be considered a bug which needs to be remedied by indeed enforcing it.
An additional method being available, or the changed behavior being noted in the field value entry box label.
N/A (I think)
N/A (I think)
Active
2.1
Code
Thanks for creating this feature request with all the details in the IS.
I'd prefer option 1 to introduce a new method "Empty field". The validation, that the given field can be emptied should happen in the access control, and the execute will then just have to do the actual work, if it is possible and allowed.