Problems modifying synonyms (and other textual values) that have leading or trailing spaces #330
Description
Users reported that they were not able to change the value of certain synonyms. See for example this message from @cannn
Carine today couldn't edit a synonym. She tried to remove a word and an unnecessary space. There were no errors but the update is not saved. I tried with my account with the same result
...
http://id.who.int/icd/entity/1828722493 . She tried to edit the synonym by removing the space in the beginning and the last word "agree"
It turns out that the UI removes all the leading and trailing white spaces from the textual values, both at the time of reading it from the backend for display, and at the time of saving, in order to store nice clean values, without unnecessary "invisible" characters that can mess up the later renderings and comparisons, especially by humans. This should be all good, as long as the values don't already contain such leading/trailing white spaces, which should be always the case for ontologies created from scratch in WebProtege/iCAT-X. However, for projects that were created from ontologies that were edited outside of WebProtege/iCAT-X, which is also the case of the WHO-FIC Foundation project, textual values can contain leading/trailing spaces, which may lead to the inability of updating these values through the UI.
Luckily we discovered that these values can be updated through the API, so WHO will try to clean up these values with a series of API calls, so that the users will work with clean values. However, this problem in the UI should be solved somehow for the the reliability of WebProtege/iCAT-X.