Error message for a custom review form

Feature Requests
1

Hello,

we have a made a custom review form with some requested fields. If a reviewer tries to submit a review with one of those fields empty, the form remains open but no error message is shown. The notification of a missing field is at the side of the empty form item but the reviewer has to scroll the form to find it. We have had cases when a reviewer has left the page wondering if the review is submitted. You should add an error message to the cases when there is an error, not just stall the form. In our case, when the reviewer tries to submit a form with an empty field, a message “A requested field is empty” should be shown so that the reviewer knows to look through the form. We use OJS 3.1.0-1.

Pekka Nygren
Finnish Society of Forest Science
https://ojs.silvafennica.fi/index.php/silvafennica/index

2

Hi @pnygren

I’m trying to reproduce this problem in OJS v. 3.1.1-4 and can’t. When adding a custom text field in the reviewer form and if it is empty, from the reviewer side I see corresponding message. But it is possible that it was fixed from OJS 3.1.0. Can you confirm that this problem appears in the latest stable OJS?

3

Dear Vitaliy,

just to be sure that you understood my question correctly:

The system does show a message at the side of a required box if it empty when trying to submit the form. However, if the empty box is not in the submit view of the reviewer but it is in a upper part of the form, the reviewer does not receive any notification that there is an error on the form.

In this case, the reviewer did not fill in the required “General comments to the authors” field, which is no more visible when submitting the review as below it there are other items. There is no error message anywhere.

If the reviewer scrolls up, they will find the error message although they cannot see it when trying to submit:

The problem we have met quite a few times is that because there is no message box indicating a missing field when the submission is unsuccesful, some reviewers assume that the review is submitted and leave the page, thus, loosing the whole review.

Thus, the problem is: When a submission is unsuccesful, the system should show an error message at the top right corner “A required field is empty” – just it shows the message of a succesful review.

Can you reproduce this with a newer OJS version?

Best regards,

Pekka Nygren

Executive Manager, Finnish Society of Forest Science

Associate Editor, Silva Fennica

Viikinkaari 6, 00790 Helsinki, Finland

Tel: +358 44 558 1199

E-mail: pekka.nygren@metsatiede.org