That was not our thinking. The simple solution is to just to use the Description field in the archetype definition, the rule being that if there is a Description for the element, use that in the UI, otherwise use the Node name. The only risk there is that a Description is being used for a different purpose, so we could add an an archetype annotation which says specifically ‘Use the Description in the UI’
So no changes to the RM are required. Clearly there would be an impact on tooling e.g CKM or Form builder tooling that would have to understand those rules but it’s not a massive change IMO.
I agree that it does add a burden to modellers/reviewers but if we keep the ‘allowed character limit’ fairly high, the burden might be lower than seems the case now.
I agree that our node names are not ‘column names’ as such but what I meant was that other people who are building on copyrighted scores will have their own internal field names for technical purposes and which the copyright owners will not normally be bothered about these internal names, as long as the UI is descibed correctly.
I was not quite sure about the profit bit!!
There is one other option which might solve this conundrum is that we could possibly use the short names at template level I,e long-form questions in the archetype but substitute a short form in templates where the system needs them for whatever technical reason, including FLAT format.
Do we have any sense of the various lengths of ‘long questions’ - maybe the number of really problematic items is lower than we think?