For those who have played with EM suffixes, you have probably seen that if they refer to variables on the same page, they always generate a <span> element. For example,

Yields this if on the same page:

But this if on a different page:

This has led to challenges like the one discussed in this thread, where attempts to get the sgqa code on the same page were temporarily stymied by the dynamic substitution feature.

Perhaps some of those question metadata should be statically substituted even when on the same page. The logical option would be to allow static substitution for anything that could not be dynamic. So, it might make sense to upgrade the substitution engine to do the following:

(1) Continue to make these dynamic:

SUFFIX	SUBSTITUTION_TYPE
(no suffix)	dynamic
code	dynamic
NAOK	dynamic
relevanceStatus	dynamic
shown	dynamic
value	dynamic
valueNAOK	dynamic

(2) But make these static, even when on the same page:

SUFFIX	SUBSTITUTION_TYPE
gid	static
grelevance	static
gseq	static
jsName	static
mandatory	static
qid	static
qseq	static
question	static
readWrite	static
relevance	static
rowdivid	static
sgqa	static
type	static

The only down-side of using static substitution is that if you wanted to use {q.question} to show the text of a question, but you wanted to hide that value if the question was irrelevant, you would need to use the following instead:

At present, if q is irrelevant, q.question would not be shown at all.

Thoughts from the developers and broader community?

Hi

But how about a suffix-suffix instead that signals that a certain variable is displayed statically.

like

With this solution,

You put < span > at all value that can change, and static for static value.


Maybe there are some problem (or not) with some static :
For example :
q.question : if the q.question have some anotherq.value, then according to the static/synamic you have:and it's OK.

I just see this one, but maybe there are another

I had toyed with other suffix-suffixes too. For example, instead of having .valueNAOK, we could just have .NAOK as a suffix. That way you could do

which would mean to show the question even if it is irrelevant. That would also let us get rid of

and change it to

However, I'm not sure we really need a .static suffix. I'm leaning to thinking that non-potentially-dynamic values should never be encased in a <span> tag. And if that is the case, .static couldn't work on a dynamic value anyway (unless we somehow wanted to keep the first value and not let it change - but that is a whole different matter).