I've written a couple of advance search type applications for clients with
mixed responses.
We did one at NASA which would allow searching about a hundred fields in a
two-part form. First they would enter all values for each field and we
would assume "and" between each. Then they could either run the search or
click Advanced to handle concatenations. In the concatenations page they
could choose to put "not" and switch between "and" and "or" and also create
groups (parenthesis). This worked well for us once we wrote it and it could
do pretty much anything, but the users had a hard time with it and only a
few users ever used it.
More recently at USDA we wrote an application which we based on the BizTalk
rules wizard UI (I may have the name wrong--I don't know BizTalk, I've just
seen that one UI once). This UI used a tree to represent all the terms. So
a filter:
LastName = 'Jenson' OR (FirstName = 'Sam' AND LastName = 'Neff') OR
(FirstName = 'John' AND LastName = 'Smith')
Would be represented in the tree as
OR
|
+- LastName = 'Jenson'
|
+-AND
| |
| +- FirstName = 'Sam'
| |
| +- LastName = 'Neff'
|
+-AND
|
+- FirstName = 'John'
|
+- LastName = 'Smith'
And then there was a small UI to edit an individual node within the tree.
Using this interface you could build any query and it was easily visualized.
Took a little getting used to, but the users that used our application a lot
(and in our situation our users used the application every day all day) it
was easy to use and they liked the advanced search. Also it was fairly easy
to program. We did it in DHTML and .NET and it would be a million times
easier in Flex.
Personally, I would like to just give the user a big text area and they can
free-form a boolean query using and's and or's and parenthesis and such and
we can parse it. For an advanced user, I think that would be fine.
Unfortunately I've never had a client agree so I haven't had any chance to
do usability testing on this type of interface.
HTH,
Sam
-----Original Message-----
From: flexcoders@yahoogroups.com [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On
Behalf Of Mike Anderson
Sent: Wednesday, December 20, 2006 1:25 PM
To: flexcoders@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [flexcoders] Question for all you SQL Query experts
Hello All,
I was wondering how you more seasoned SQL programmers (as it relates to
the User Interface side of things), provide the ability of advanced SQL
Queries to novice users - but in a "easy to use" and "non-threatening"
manner?
