We have had a need for quite a while now to be able to distinguish and notate both the Author and The Contributor. Currently the system assumes that the Author is the person logged in and submitting the document. In our situation outside Authors have supplied items for us to store in our repository. We would like to be able to sort / search on Authors for these items. Currently there is no way to do this. One way to solve this would be to allow us to select the data type for the Attributes. Currently we only have a attribute with a pre-defined set of options for that attribute. While we can display these attributes as either check boxes or radio buttons, that ability is control by the templates and not by actually defining the data type for the attribute. I would suggest that we be alowed to define attributes as Pre-Defined types of Radio, Check and Dropdown and also add a combo control that displays a radio,check box,drop down of available items as well as a text box to create (on the fly) new items for the specific attribute.

Using this add on the fly attribute a person could look to see if the Author of the document is already an option and if not they could add them. I would also allow the Admin to modify and add to the attribute within the module setup section as normal. This would allow them to correct things like spelling mistakes.

If anyone has any other suggestions for allowing this functionality please post your idea here for me to try.

Thanks