Adding comment in a pop-up

Question

In our system whenever a user wishes to move one entity from its module to another module he has to enter a comment in a pop-up.

I want to provide the similar functionality in another module with one difference: When an entity is moved to this module, it is actually added to one of the existing entities. Therefore the user is first provided with a pop-up to search through the existing entities.

Where should I place the textbox to add comment in the above situation? giving 2 pop-ups, one for comment & second for Search would be bad design.. also adding a text field for comment on search screen can be confusing,..how do i handle this?

Answer 1

It sounds to me that selecting which entity to use and specifying a comment are operations that easily could be divided into two different steps.

When the user initiates the move of an entity you should display a search form to find an entity, the user selects which entity to move to, and after that you display the same commenting window that you use conventionally.

^{download bmml source – Wireframes created with Balsamiq Mockups}

This was GUI consistency is maintained between views. The workflow will differ but it sounds like this is something that can't be avoided to provide full functionality.