Fact sheet: empty entries in select sometimes not shown

[johann-petrak]

My fact sheet config contains the following:

   "confirm": {
     "key": "confirm",
     "type": "select",   
     "title": "Please confirm that you are submitting to Subtask 1, Closed track",
     "selection": ["", "    ", "I confirm"],
     "is_required": "true",
     "is_on_leaderboard": "false"
  },

However the form shown on the submission tab ONLY and by default shows "I confirm".

It should, instead show the empty selection by default and the dropdown should show two empty selections. This happens sometimes but sometimes does not happen after uploading the bundle, no idea what influences this.

Here is one of the projects where it does not work: https://www.codabench.org/competitions/2642/?secret_key=60dc604b-fdec-4e74-b15d-2b800907a30c

here is a project where it does work: https://www.codabench.org/competitions/2630/?secret_key=0dbc01b2-8595-4bd0-8acf-0f1cf790b6ed

[Didayolo]

Thank you for reporting the problem. I close the issue as it is a very specific problem with no actual use cases.

[johann-petrak]

So you do not consider it a bug when not all options given in select are actually shown and when the behaviour is not even predictable ( since sometimes the empty entries are shown and sometimes they are not)? this is incorrect behavior that is reproducible and it makes the form feature much less useful, because, well, we had a use case for this.

[Didayolo]

My bad if you had an use case for several empty selection, e.g. "" and " ". That is a bit unexpected to be honest.

Note that Codabench is an open source community project, to which you are more than welcome to contribute by making pull requests. This is especially true for features and fixes requests that are specific to the needs of your project.

[johann-petrak]

The reason why there were 2 empty at the start is because that was an attempt to deal with the bug that an empty selection alone was not shown. Turns out, even if there are two, only the non-empty element is sometimes shown. I think it is even somewhere in the documentation that an empty string CAN be specified as a default. There is also no reason why an empty selection should not be possible as the default value, there is nothing unexpected about that requirement as this is done very often in forms.

In order for anyone to go to the effort to create a pull request, a bug must first get acknowledged to be a bug. Closing this issue does the exact opposite and creates the impression that the maintainers are not interested to solve this issue.

To reiterate: the bug is that an empty string is not always shown in the selection box as expected and as would be logical. It would also be a bug if it was never shown, however, this seems to be something that randomly does and does not happen.