On 23 Oct 1998, Jeroen Pluimers writes:
>> If you leave the filter empty and "accept", you will get the whole
>> thing. Linuxconf triggers this filter when a list has ... 15
>> entries :-)
> I really dislike the filter behaviour as it is implemented now.
> Currently, the behaviour of the user interface depends on the number
> of entries in the list.
> That behaviour should not exist, as it makes the process more
> difficult to comprehend and (worse) more difficult to monitor with
> external (automated) scripting tools.
I tend to agree here. The 'surprise' of a new screen at 15 users in
the user accounts menus confused one of my novice sysadmins a couple
of weeks back. He thought something had broken! The UI really ought
not to radically change like this at some arbitrary number of entries.
The magic value of 15 is apparently hard coded in several places in
the code, too, rather than being a defined constant, which makes hacks
like making it zero (always filtering) or making it 65535 (almost
never filter) more awkward than would otherwise be necessary.
> I have thought about two solutions:
>
> - always have the filter dialog before you see anything of the list
> - always show the list, with an extra edit box to specify the filter
The second approach will be problematic when the list is really big,
like 1000 entries... the HTML page generated would be huge and take a
very long time to be sent, when it is not really wanted anyway.
Sending the whole list before the user can choose to filter it defeats
one important purpose of filtering, I would think. So, annoying
though it will be for those with small numbers of entries, I suspect
the only reasonable way to have filtering is to always have filtering.
At least it is then consistent :-)
Jonathan
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