TYPO3 Core

When you have a scenario with multiple nested IRRE records and a field with TCA property onChange in a child record, the reload behaviour after the change event was triggered can become a usability nightmare as the whole record gets reloaded.

Sample case (from a real world extension): you have a survey, that can be structured into multiple sections (1st level IRRE record) and has multiple questions per section (2nd level IRRE record). Each question can have a type (multiple choice checkboxes, radio button group, plain text entry etc.) that determines, which question fields are available. This can be easily achieved with an onChange property on the question type field and displayCond on various other fields.

Problem: after changing the question type, the whole survey record reloads and all opened IRRE records are closed again. So you have to remember which record you were editing last and re-open the correnct section + question to continue editing the question. With a large survey (eg. 15 sections, 5-10 questions each) this quickly becomes a complete usability nightmare that drives editors insane.

Suggestions:

1. Best case scenario: only reload the current question record, not the whole top parent record. When opening an IRRE record, data for this record gets loaded by AJAX and the form updates accordingly. Couldn't that be done for reloads triggered by a TCA onChange event?
2. Second best option: automatically re-open the last edited IRRE records (ie. section + question) after reloading. The UI already "remembers" things when editing + saving records, e.g. the tab that was last active. This suggests that the same should be possible for IRRE records as well?