Yeah I sort of figured it wasn't clear cut. One thing we did with one client, was to have the search filtered from the left or right hand side. Thus allowing for the results to return in the main content section.
There are plenty of DHTML frameworks that will work, but it will depend on your UI (look and feel as well as Usability) and how you want to do it. So if you think about an accordion style, and they just click on that section to drop it down to filter more. So each section becomes like a field list, that can be shown or hidden on request. >From a flash point of view, I think it is Porter Davis website has a brilliant drill down filtering option. But that might be over kill to what you require though. But yeah, I see where you are coming from. Regards, Andrew Scott -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Barry Beattie Sent: Thursday, 28 August 2008 5:43 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [cfaussie] Re: looking for inspiration: search screens > Question: Is the search limited to the internal application? yes, and there are a bunch of mandatory fields, pre-defined categories and optional keywords that can aid in the full text search for results. but (there be dragons there) a lot of results will be reliant on categories the results belong to - categories that won't necessarily be part of the search but can be scanned by the operator to quickly exclude or find potential relivant results. Google itself (even the advance search) hasn't the ability to provide sorting (so having sortable columns on results is impossible) and while I *can* have them thanks to the defined categories of the data I'm wondering if I really need them. the next trick is the actual screen real estate the results are displayed in. You can fit a reasonable amount of results in a 800x600 screen (worst case) - certainly enough to then see the need to refine the search or not. But it's displaying enough data of each result so the operator can consider or discard it.Tooltips/onMouseOver can help, but what's really needed is the additional ability to easily show all the data returned for a specific result (approx 2* A4 pages of text over about 30 fields) which is laid out in a pre-defined format. Think of it as a drill-down. This is based on the fact that each search will be using different criteria (different columns/attributes) to have a hit. You can do a lot of heavy lifting right at the start by "pre-filtering" (utilising the picklist values of attributes) but you can also waste a lot of time doing so before you hit the "search" button. And as I said, Google doesn't need this feature. (the other downside to this is that, sometimes getting back "fuzzy" results - not exact matches - can lead to offering alternative results which might be worth using - leave it to the operator to judge) When it comes to results layout, I like the fluidity of Flash-based apps which adjusts the screen real estate according to whether you're interested in the master results or drilling down to check out the detail. But I haven't seen a good DHTML one that's smooth... ... and opening the detail in a child window, while workable, strikes me as a bit clunky. See what I mean by a "black art"? --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "cfaussie" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/cfaussie?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
