Dataselect Improvements

I recently spoke to Drew at Industry Conf and discussed an issue I found with using dataselect in Perch.

In a real use case, I produced a website for a client who provides care homes. I wanted to create a multi-item region of facilities that could be applied to each individual care home, and each home has different facilities.

Now, dataselect does work here to get the list of facilities. The problem however, is finding the best way (with a good UX) for the client to select them. In theory, I could have wrapped a dataselect in a repeater so that the client could add just the facilities they need to each home, but ideally it should be an array of options in checkbox format. In the end I opted to hard code the facilities as checkboxes in the care home template, but this isn't ideal.

Could an improvement be made to dataselect that would allow for multiple items to be selected? I think a checkbox list could be the best way to implement it, but obviously that brings a whole different set of functionality into place. I don't know if it'd be better keeping dataselect as is and possibly adding a new datacheckbox or similar to the core?

Of course, Runway could solve this entire problem by using Collections and Relationships, but as it isn't a huge problem at the minute (and as I found it later during the development), I decided to stick with Perch.

Anyway, I hope this is something that you might consider!

Cheers, Phil