Dashboard dropdown - Allow object in msg.payload

Core Development Feature Requests
1

Hi folks,

To be able to finish another discussion I need to show a list of webcams in a dropdown on my dashboard.

The list of webcams is available as label-value pairs, so I pass pairs these to the UI dropdown node:

msg.options= [ {
    label: "USB2.0 HD UVC Webcam",
    id: "csO9c0YpAf274OuCPUA53CNE0YHlIr2yXCi+SqfBZZ8=" },
    ...
]

And I want to make sure that the first webcam is automatically selected in the dropdown, so I also need to pass the id as selected value:

msg.payload = "csO9c0YpAf274OuCPUA53CNE0YHlIr2yXCi+SqfBZZ8="

Which all works very well:

image

However the status of the dropdown node shows the id, which is not really human readable:

image

It would be nice if the label (instead of the id) could be displayed in the node status. But that means that the msg.payload would also have to allow a label-value pair (beside the current option to only pass a value)!

  • When only a value is passed, that value is displayed as node status (to avoid breaking existing flows).
  • When label-value pair is passed, the label is displayed as node status.

Remark: have been looking at the code, but it is not really clear to me how to implement this. I assume the client (only in case it gets as input a label-value pair) also needs to send a label-value pair back to the server (as soon as another option is selected in the dropdown), so the beforeSend can show the label.

Any thoughts?

Bart

2

The editor is not a dashboard.

1 Like
3

However the status of the dropdown node shows the id

It shows msg.payload.

4

Yes that is correct, but since my msg.payload is only allowed to contain the id (and not the label) it will show the id.

Case closed ...

5

hmm - but html selects have always worked that way - they have the part you can see in the list and the value they return - they don't return both parts. What gets returned (the id in this case) is up to you... so you can return the name if you want.