Le 05/02/2015 08:02, Ron Wheeler a écrit :
I think that they are showing search results as the user types and the ERP does
not care what field you are entering.
If you start typing in the postal code field it will display everyone whose
postal code matches what you have typed so far.
When you stop typing, you can select the party that you are interested in from
the search results on the screen.
If you start with a phone number or last name or whatever, the effect is the
same.
Then as I proposed a tool like Solr seems appropriate. But this means also a
lot of work to integrate.
It clearly places a load on some computer(server or browser) and the balance between bandwidth, server processing and user convenience is constantly
changing.
Yes this is actually the problem. Not everybody can afford such load and
actually need the feature.
The dropdown filtering is a good start but they are carrying the process one
step further.
It's a bit like bid data. It greats to have when you need it, but not everybody
really needs it and can afford what it entails.
Jacques
Ron
On 05/02/2015 12:30 AM, Jacques Le Roux wrote:
BTW, when a lookup is not appropriate there is also the simpler autocomplete dropdown field that we have recently fixed
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/OFBIZ-6036
By and large there are more possibilities in this area, cf
http://demo-trunk-ofbiz.apache.org/example/control/FormWidgetExamples
Jacques
Le 04/02/2015 23:43, Jacques Le Roux a écrit :
Le 04/02/2015 16:02, Ron Wheeler a écrit :
http://post.technologyevaluation.com/t/180998/19677306/17511/2/?560a3889=VEVDIDIwMTUgRVJQIGZvciBEaXNjcmV0ZSBNYW51ZmFjdHVyaW5nIEJ1eWVyJ3MgR3VpZGU%3d&3b64e84d=X19uZXdzbGV0dGVyX2RhaWx5X2Vu&3b64e84d=X19uZXdzbGV0dGVyX2RhaWx5X2Vu&b0c7069d=MjM4NDEzOA%3d%3d&fb8dc108=cndoZWVsZXJAYXJ0aWZhY3Qtc29mdHdhcmUuY29t&x=3c8d597c
is a link to an interesting whitepaper from TEC (Gartner competitor) discussing
the main ERP solutions that they follow.
The big trend that they identify is a move to more functional user interfaces that actually help users make sense of the data and find what they
want quickly and do that in a way that is familiar to ERP users (Spreadsheets model).
They talk about automatic search where the user can type information into any field (phone number, first name, company name and have the system
show up potential matches without having to go to a search screen. This is what people who use email or web browsers expect computers to be able
to do.
I did not read yet.
When we standardized javascript in OFBiz, by replacing all other javascript frameworks and APIs by jQuery, there have been a specific effort
around lookups and we implemented the auto-complete feature inside them (actually the js standardization came from this effort, which was
initially done on the calendar where we began to replace pop-ups by js-layers). Auto-complete is just the feature you explain above. Of course
limited, it's not a search engine, the set is constrained. In theory, we could have something much more powerful based on Solr for instance. But
I'm not sure we will ever see that in OFBiz...
BTW, during the jQuery effort, I improved the Price Rules and Promo Rules screens, using dependent dropdowns I then introduced (you would have to
use R09.04 to see how it was before). I even made recently an effort in the Product Promo Rules screen to use auto-complete lookups instead of
simple inputs
http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/ofbiz/trunk/applications/product/webapp/catalog/promo/EditProductPromoRules.ftl?r1=1653938&r2=1653937&pathrev=1653938
I believe there are still inputs we could replace by auto-complete lookups. An effort which would be worth to do would be to take an inventory of
those. We could then replace them...
Jacques
