The only alternative is to either not use the filter/select or to constantly be adding on the the field. This was a deliberate decision for "least" surprise.

Host requires a FQDN, and it does not allow the zone to be specified separately.

Another option is to use separate fields for the short name and the domain name. The short name will be a text field. The domain name will be a drop down list. They will be combined to create FQDN on submit. This is similar to calculating krbprincipalname from service type and hostname in services.

We need to tune the desgin here. The logic should be:

If the text in the field completely matches one of the zones, replace the text on click.

The question is what happens if it doesn't match? Blindly appending will end up with a constantly growing URL.

Need to triage it again.

I took a look at the screen. There are several issues as I see:

1. The hostname has a drop down. This is not intuitive.
2. The arrow is missing so it is not clear that there is a drop down
3. The drop down when invoked does not have a label so it is unclear what it is about
4. The list contains an empty line before the first domain
5. When domain is picked the hostname is overwritten

What I would prefer to see:
1. Hostname and domain are two separate fields
2. Host name is a type in text field
3. Domain is a drop down
4. The code should detect that the user typed a dot in the host name and automatically disable or enable the drop down.
5. If the hostname does not contain dot the user would be able to select a domain. If he typed a dot the domain will be disabled and the hostname is assumed to contain the domain portion.
6. If user typed a short name, selected domain and then continued typing and added a dot the drop down would be disabled.
7. The submit action will use hostname if it contains dot and will construct the full name from host name + '.' + domain if it does not.

IMO this is the most user friendly and logical approach.
In this case the label in front of the domain drop down will be sufficient and no label is needed in the domain drop down.

The icons are a separate issue, and will be fixed in a patch shortly.

The setup as it is now will maybe mess people up once. I added the dropdown becasue I was sick of cut-and-pasting the zone name, and I think most people will feel the same. The amount of single use code required to do what you have specified is significnat, and I don't know that it will add anything to the long term usability. It has some subtle logic to it as well, such as the fact that the zone name is sometimes in the edit box and sometimes not.

I recommend we leave it as as until we have people that use it regularly give us feed back that it is messing them up. I suspect what we will find is that they say "it is fine as is."

Sorry I disagree. The screen now is confusing and hardly usable. Sometimes you have to implement special processing to make things nicer for the user. And it is not a one time use code. It is used every time the host is added so this is definitely a regularly used feature.
Please plan the effort.

If you see the way to make it better but not go whole 9 yards I am open for discussion.

How about this: we use separate fields for hostname and domain. If you type a dot in the hostname field the cursor will move automatically to the domain field. The hostname will be a regular text field, the domain will be a drop-down list like it is now.

Two fields - great! This is what we should do.
However the proposed approach with dot would not work if the name is edited or pasted from a different source.

We can do validation when user clicks add button. We can check and see if the domain was selected and if so and the name contains dots we might ask for clarification. Something like:
"Manually entered domain suffix will take precedence over the selected domain. Do you want to continue?"

If user selects yes the domain data will be ignored otherwise the user will be returned to correct the name manually. i.e either clear the domain suffix or finish typing full domain suffix and say "yes" to the popup the second time.

I think when the FQDN is pasted from somewhere else we can also split it immediately into hostname and domain and put the values in the appropriate field. So in any case the hostname field will never contain a dot, so no need to ask another clarification. Would this be better?

This needs UX design. Reassigning to Kyle for his layout, and then we can implement.

I agree that the two field approach would be best. I have sent a PDF which shows an approach which satisfies both use cases.

master: 5681aea