When a submission is pending, the fields should render statically for editors

[MoritzLost]

Describe the bug

After submitting a draft for review, editors can still edit fields in the form, even though they can't modify the submitted draft. This is bad in terms of the author experience. Editors might enter a bunch of changes after submitting a draft without realizing they can't modify it anymore, and end up losing their work.

The AX in terms of error reporting in this state is also not good. As soon as you type anything in any field, Craft tries to automatically save the draft, which fails because of the server-side validation. The error, however, doesn't tell you anything about what the problem is:

The draft could not be saved.

Suggested solution

When a user can only create drafts, but not save live entries, opening an entry form with render all fields statically. Before they can do anything, they have to click on Create draft. At this point, the form becomes interactive and they can edit their draft.

In the state described above, the entry form should be rendered statically in the same way. You can still see all the fields, but not edit anything. In order to edit the draft again, the editor has to wait for the submission review, or retract the draft

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As a sidenote, this problem is compounded by a bug in the Google Maps plugin field, which causes the field to be marked as having unsaved changes immediately: doublesecretagency/craft-googlemaps#138

This results in all entries showing the above error immediately after submission.

Steps to reproduce

1. As an editor, create a draft and submit it.
2. The entry form is still active.

Craft CMS version

5.8.11

Plugin version

3.0.9

Multi-site?

No

Additional context

No response

[engram-design]

I suppose the issue here is that we can't really interfere with the entry's rendering of fields like Craft can with its permissions. Yes, we can mess around with JS and manipulating fields that way (which probably isn't feasible), but we can't really say to an entry that it should render statically if a Workflow submission exists, and is in the correct state.

[MoritzLost]

@engram-design I was thinking it might be possible to use an event hook to modify the form to render statically, if the current draft has a pending submission? The static version of the form already exists, after all, the form just needs to be told to render this way?

[MoritzLost]

If that's not possible, it would be good to improve the error message at least. Not sure if that is possible if the draft saving is aborted through a hook.

[engram-design]

Yeah, I've been looking into an event hook to modify the rendering of an entry. There's a good one for CreateFieldLayoutFormEvent, where static = true can be set, but unfortunately, they don't allow the event to modify the value.

A PR should sort that.

As for the error message, we do manage that. But we can remove this if we implement the above handling.

[MoritzLost]

@engram-design That looks promising, thanks!

As for the error message, we do manage that. But we can remove this if we implement the above handling.

Curious, because I'm only seeing the generic error message as seen in the screenshot above, not the custom message you linked to. Even while impersonating an author. Not sure if this is working as intended. But that's probably irrelevant if the form can render statically in the future 👍

[engram-design]

Hmm, probably something with Craft changing again with this behaviour. It's been a bit of a moving target over the years!

But yes, we've now refactored things to make that pretty unnecessary with static fields now.

[engram-design]

Updated for the next release. To get this early, run composer require verbb/workflow:"dev-craft-5 as 3.0.9".

[MoritzLost]

@engram-design That will be a great improvement, thanks!

I'll try that out once the release is stable (budget is kind of tight with this project at the moment, I can't afford to spin up dev-branches at the moment).

[engram-design]

Updated in 3.0.10