Cake 3.0 bake index template limits to first 7 fields

[djamesfar]

It took me hours to figure out why the eighth field of my users table wasn't showing up in index views.
Template/index.ctp creates a Collection of fields, but chains on ->take(7) at the end to limit the list, presumably so index tables don't get too wide for screens. Wouldn't it be better to show them all and offer an optional limit value, or better yet specify a list of fields to show/omit? In 2.x you just went into the baked view and deleted any <th>'s and <td>'s you didn't want. Now you have to pop the hood on the form template and discover and remove the hard-coded (7). Good luck to newbies!
Either way, arbitrarily, and secretly, lopping off everything after the first 7 fields is not the friendliest Bake feature.

[lorenzo]

It is not, but is also extremely annoying having to remove all the fields. Do you have a suggestion of how this could be improved?

[djamesfar]

Make a bake template --columnsLimt command-line option or something, then call ->take($columnsLimit) in the form.ctp template. Unless someone happens to copy the template files into their own plugin and dig through it, the average person will never find that.
If you hard-code a value behind the scenes that changes the user's output, at the very least it should be mentioned in the documentation!

[josegonzalez]

@djamesfar no need for exclamation points, it reads as yelling :)

Would you be willing to come up with a pr for this? Sounds like a useful change - and there are likely other places where this is the case.

The other thing we can do is make this injectable from an event?

[lorenzo]

I like the idea :)

[lorenzo]

Maybe also an option for the columns to show? Like --display-fields id,name,created

[djamesfar]

Maybe have an array of excluded fields for indexes. For example, I always modify the index template for the users table and test for $field==='password' (or alias) and skip it so it doesn't show. If we could include of list of all fields to exclude rather than include, it might be a shorter list.

[lorenzo]

We could have both, I think it is a good idea

[djamesfar]

@josegonzalez is there an example of injecting from an event elsewhere in the framework you could point me to?

[josegonzalez]

I did it heavily in the bootstrap_cli.php. Here is a blog post example.

[djamesfar]

Thanks, I'll check it out.

[josegonzalez]

Note: I'm not saying thats the best way, just that it would be nice to be able to inject via an event so that you can persist changes across bakes :)

[dereuromark]

You realize that I proposed something like that years ago for cake2.x? :)
I still use it in my bake templates as "scaffoldSkipFields" etc.
https://github.com/dereuromark/cakephp-setup/blob/master/Console/Templates/setup/views/index.ctp#L26-L32
This allows blacklisting certain fields via model that should not be included in the baked views to keep the amount of fields limited.

[markstory]

I like the list of fields idea. That seems like a simple way to cover most use cases. Would the list of fields also change the generated forms?