Editable facet labels and expression names

[jquartel]

I often have a lot of facets in a project and frequently I'll have several different facets based on the same column. For instance, you might have a normal text facet on a column as well as a duplicates facet on the same column and then you’ll have two facets with the same label. I also frequently use custom text facets which combine information from multiple columns by explicit reference to the column names (e.g. something like cells.Name.value+cells.Title.value) and even though this type of facet can be created from any column (as it doesn't reference 'value' on its own), I find myself searching out one of the columns just so that the facet has a label that kind of reminds me of what it's doing.

So, given that it seems the current facet label serves only an informative role, I think it would be great if we could 1) edit the label of a facet, and 2) name expressions in the ‘starred’ expressions set (and possibly ascribe names to the ‘customized’ facets).

For (1) we could have the facet label turn into a text box so the user can freely edit the text (with [enter] or a mouse click somewhere else signifying acceptance of the change and closing out the editing mode). Alternatively, clicking on the facet name could pop up a small editing modal in the same way that clicking on the project name does. A new simple facet would still start with the selected column name as default.

When creating a custom facet, there could be a text box, perhaps above the Expression box, for the facet label. It would be populated with the selected column name by default.

For (2) I propose that in the ‘Starred’ tab there be a column for the expression name, with the cell areas being initially blank for a newly starred expression but clickable for editing (again, either by a text box in-place or by a pop-up modal). For someone like me who has dozens of pretty long and complex starred expressions, it would certainly help me quickly seek out the right one. But I also think it would be great for use in the facet naming. So if I were creating a facet on “column1”, say, and I had named my expression “myFunction”, then clicking on Reuse would, in addition to populating the expression box, also populate the label box, turning it from the “column 1” default (as described above) to something like “column1:MyFunction”.

Following on this notion of the named expressions, if the expressions used in the ‘customized’ facets (Facet > Customized Facets >) had descriptive names then this could similarly be added to the label. So if I chose to apply a duplicates facet on my “column1”, the facet would be created with the label “column1:Duplicates”, thus automatically distinguishing it (in an informative way) from, say, a plain Text facet I may already have on “column1”.

[thadguidry]

partial duplicate of #1011

[jquartel]

Ah sorry, I thought I'd done a thorough search for similar requests. But perhaps this ticket adds the request for starred expressions to be namable. Should I rename the issue?

[wetneb]

I think it would make sense to have separate issues for renaming facets and naming starred expressions, so perhaps it would indeed be worth making this issue specific to starred expressions.