[BUG] Data list override does not work

[esmeetewinkel]

Describe the bug
For specifying the languages that should appear on the language select page for each deployment, it should be possible to override the sheet language_data_list.

I've tried this for TZ and ZA here: language_data_list_tz and language_data_list_za, but this does not seem to work.

App version
v0.14.2

[chrismclarke]

I've just taken a look, and I can see what the issue is. Unfortunately this is a case where we are trying to use the overrides system for something that it just isn't really built for. The overrides are integrated into the templating system, and so only apply to templates.

Short term this leaves a few possible options:

1. Keep the 3 data lists (with different names instead of overrides) and add a condition column to the language_select template to populate depending on deployment. Something like this:

2. Keep the 3 data lists and provide a set of template overrides that change the data list (instead of the condition column - although involves creating a larger number of templates so possibly less worthwhile)

Longer term ideally we want a system where anything can be overwritten at runtime, however it will only make sense to implement once we have a single system that handles loading data (otherwise it means a lot of copy-paste for templates, data lists, and any other flow type). This is part of what is proposed with other issues related to integrating json instead of ts files

Additionally, because these datalists are statically defined we could also integrate a system that replaces files during compile so that only the relevant datalist ever makes it into the app. This would be quite easy to do once we've integrated pr #1210

[esmeetewinkel]

Thanks Chris, I've opted for your suggestion 2 and created issues #1266 (long term) and #1267 (bug fix) on the back of this.