On 11/8/05, Dave Howorth <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > When searching using a Maypole application, or when creating a new item, > there is a need to be able to choose one among a number of > possibilities. For example, you might want to search only for beers made > at a particular brewery. The normal interface for doing this is very > good - a dropdown box listing all the possible choices and you select > one. This is an excellent user interface where the number of choices is > relatively small, such as choosing a brewery, but is not so good if > there are many possible answers, such as choosing one out of all the > pubs in the world. > > I've finally managed to get something working to solve this. It's a > bunch of Perl, TT and Javascript that pops up a search window to let the > user identify the required item. It's still fairly raw, it's too > complicated, it means hacking the code in lots of places and it's just > not pretty but I've put a description here: > > http://www.mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk/dhoworth/perl/chooser.html > > I'd welcome any feedback. >
I had a similar use case and wrestled with it for a while. On a blank InternetService/addnew form , should I pop up the list of 10000 customers or just an id input box. I think your interface solution is pretty good for the general case as that is exactly what we want to know from the user -- Do you want to wait for this DB hit or do you have the id handy? Here is how is solved it. The reality for me was that a typical avenue brings them to this page with the customer id pre determined and if they were here without it they were power users and could cope with the raw interface. A typical avenue in my app to this page is through the Custome/view page where they can click "New Internet Service" . If they for some reason get to this page without a customer and do not know the customer id , they *do* know enough to search and find the customer and will just have to do that. Since this is not the typical avenue , it will suffice. For the search, I and Maypole will have a pretty decent foreign search mechanism soon. So what I did was just put foreign inputs for Brewery on my Beer search form. Genearlly all you would need is name. However if you want to see all the beers at a brewery you could always go to the Brewery/view page which would have a list of beers if Brewery has_many Beers. cheers -- pjs ------------------------------------------------------- SF.Net email is sponsored by: Tame your development challenges with Apache's Geronimo App Server. Download it for free - -and be entered to win a 42" plasma tv or your very own Sony(tm)PSP. Click here to play: http://sourceforge.net/geronimo.php _______________________________________________ Maypole-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/maypole-users
