# Add user input field to spans.manual recipe

**URL:** <https://support.prodi.gy/t/add-user-input-field-to-spans-manual-recipe/5423>\
**Category:** Uncategorized\
**Tags:** usage, custom\
**Created:** [March 4, 2022, 6:22pm UTC](https://support.prodi.gy/t/add-user-input-field-to-spans-manual-recipe/5423 "2022-03-04T18:22:29Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![cheyanneb](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/user_avatar/support.prodi.gy/cheyanneb/32/2409_2.png) [@cheyanneb](https://support.prodi.gy/u/cheyanneb)\
**Post date:** [March 4, 2022, 6:22pm UTC](https://support.prodi.gy/t/add-user-input-field-to-spans-manual-recipe/5423/1 "2022-03-04T18:22:29Z")

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Hi,

Is it possible to add a user input field to the `spans.manual` recipe in `prodigy.json`? I find that the user input field is always useful in the UI to collect annotator insights and questions if this could be added as an option.

Thanks!  
Cheyanne

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![ines](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/user_avatar/support.prodi.gy/ines/32/3_2.png) [@ines](https://support.prodi.gy/u/ines)\
**Post date:** [March 6, 2022, 2:42pm UTC](https://support.prodi.gy/t/add-user-input-field-to-spans-manual-recipe/5423/2 "2022-03-06T14:42:18Z")

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In theory, yes! The only thing you'd need to adjust here is the `view_id`, which should be `blocks` instead of `spans_manual` (or any other interface). This is something you'd have to adjust in the recipe code at the moment. The quick and dirty solution would be to find the location of your installation via `prodigy stats` and then edit the built-in recipe.

I'll think about a good way to make this configurable from the outside, e.g. via an environment variable, similar to the `PRODIGY_CONFIG_OVERRIDES`. The part that's potentially tricky here is that not every view ID can be overwritten by any other view ID, because the data formats are different. (Changing `spans_manual` to `blocks` with a `spans_manual` block is of course no problem, but other combinations wouldn't necessarily work.)