What is the Attribute Expanded Text allocation attribute type?

[cecilialau6776]

Allocation Attribute Types come with a "Attribute Expanded Text" type by default. How does this differ from "Text"?

[csbarnet]

Looking at the code documentation, I see this in the documentation for the AllocationAttribute class under the 'expanded_value' method:

For attributes with attribute type of 'Attribute Expanded Text' we look for an attribute with same name suffixed with '_attriblist' (this should be ResourceAttribute of the Resource associated with the attribute). If the attriblist attribute is found, we use it to generate a dictionary to use to expand the attribute value, and the expanded value is returned.
This is a little puzzling, but I think it's a mechanism for returning values from associated ResourceAttributes when you are working with Allocation objects.

There are more details in coldfront.core.attribute_expansion.py.

It would be great to hear from someone about how this is used in practice!

[dsajdak]

This is the pull request that introduced attribute expanded text. The PR is very detailed but as a non-programmer I've always found it difficult to understand. We recently had an internal discussion about pulling this out because of it's complexity and the difficulty it poses when considering refactoring the allocation model.