James Dingwall wrote:
Hi,
Following suggestions that I should try a more recent version of faxuton
I have updated some observations. I was able to easily install via npm
and point it to a CouchDB 1.6.1 installation.
Michelle Phung wrote:
One of the things I would like to cover in my presentation is what CouchDB
as a community, would like to see implemented in Fauxton, and what can be
improved.
My experience of using the version of fauxton bundled in CouchDB
1.6.1 (with SeaMonkey 2.33.1 in case its a browser thing...)
Too much space around text in the layout , default font size too large
- I use the interface primarily as a debug/development tool so I want
as much in the browser window as possible and it doesn't need to look
pretty. In the futon interface I can see ~20 rows at a time against 7
in fauxton which makes for a lot of scrolling. I do a reasonable
amount of work in VMs and have a limited screen resolution and even
with a maximised browser window the left hand menu generally overlaps
the Database-Replication and Documentation-Logout divs. If I adjust
the view to 80% in the browser most things layout better for my
preferences.
Padding and font size doesn't appear to have changed so my comments
still hold on these points. The overlapping divs problem has been fixed.
Once you enter the database another vertical column is rendered with
the design documents so between that and the fixed left menu half the
page is lost. I preferred the drop down selection of design
documents/views in futon due to its minimal use of page real estate
but this feature was slightly irritating in that it could take a long
time to populate the drop down over a slower connection. I am most
interested in viewing/editing documents so would like the design of
the page to maximise the space available for that function. There is
no apparent option to increase the number of documents shown in each
page from 20 in fauxton. I also found the two column presentation of
view results in futon more easily navigated than just presenting raw json.
I have attached two screen shots from the same database in a typical
sized window that I work in. I hope this illustrates how much of a
drawback the new layout is when listing view results. What has changed
is the addition of the page size drop down and the navigation which is
always visible which does help with moving forwards and backwards in the
paged results. I preferred the immediately accessible feature
The default behaviour in fauxton is to show the expanded documents
instead of an _id which is a hyperlink to the document. When design
documents are a few 100kb this makes for an unresponsive browser
experience since these typically appear first in the all documents view.
I am testing this version of fauxton in a different environment but this
operation seems more responsive on a database with similar structure.
The edit document page shows the full json structure. When documents
are large this makes it more difficult to locate what you want to
change. In futon objects and arrays were shown collapsed by default
but it was still a bit awkward to edit deeply nested objects. Futon
has separate edit pages for working with the whole document or parts
of the document. I would like to see an edit mode where it is
possible to expand objects and then enable editing for only the
expanded part of the object. In particular this would be useful for
large design documents which contain many keys. I like the syntax
colouring of fauxton in the whole document edit page which helps to
identify errors.
I would like to see a collapse all/expand all option added to the
document editor. For larger documents I tend to know the structure so
expanding the path I'm interested in is easier than trying to find the
one I want in a 1000+ lines with no sort order so starting with a single
level expansion would help. The text editing function for strings in
fauxton is massively improved and is a much nicer way to deal with
javascript functions containing \n and \t characters. In futon having
the top level keys in a separate column was helpful but I think I could
get used to the fauxton editor. Perhaps a future enhancement is to add
doc.language syntax highlighting to string edits if the key resides
under views, updates, shows, lists etc.
I get the impression that more whizzy effects (fade in/out, sliding divs
etc) have been added which don't play nicely with remote sessions with
low bandwidth so a preference to use more basic transitions would be useful.
In the CouchDB configuration page the layout of the options does not
work well in the same sized window as the attached screen shots with the
text overlaying content from adjacent cells.
James
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