Your Account Drop Down List is the greatest

carl0527 · New Member Joined: Jan 06, 2006 Posts: 18

Raven and team have done a fantastic job as always. But the drop down option in Your Account was the greatest unexpected addition! For me, it will save frequent trips to phpmyadmin to find user accounts to fix things for my users. Thanks again for the fantastic product and support.

fkelly · Posted: Wed Feb 13, 2008 9:43 pm

Thanks! Two quick tips which you may have discovered. Use the tab key after you input part of a item, otherwise it will act like a submit and take you to the modify user screen. And if you filter out all the users just use the "users" button from "up above" on the ACP to refresh the list.

Susann · Posted: Thu Feb 14, 2008 7:57 am

Really the drop down option is a cool thing and very helpful. Wink

montego · Posted: Fri Feb 15, 2008 6:32 am

And who knows, if we should decide to standardize on an AJAX library, the world will be our oyster... lol. Imagine starting to type away and have a list automatically be pared down as you type... Wink

Guardian2003 · Posted: Fri Feb 15, 2008 8:08 am

montego wrote:

And who knows, if we should decide to standardize on an AJAX library, the world will be our oyster... lol. Imagine starting to type away and have a list automatically be pared down as you type... Wink

You just love giving yourself more work lol Wink

fkelly · Posted: Fri Feb 15, 2008 10:26 am

Actually, not to be contradictory but we sometimes get carried away with this Ajax thing. There is no need to interact with the server to have the list automatically pared down. All the data (say users and email addresses) is stored in a Javascript array when the page is loaded. Even the current application could be set to search the array after each keystroke, it just would be inefficient and not particularly useful.

One of the things I've been thinking is that we need to better formalize where and when and how Javascript should be used in RN. I'd include Ajax in this. We really should have a "standard" library of Javascript routines (email check, phone number format check, zip code check, date validation and date picker) that any developer within a module could call on and not have to write their own.

Most user interface guidelines say to put the error checking as close to the entry as possible. So, if you move off an email field on a form and your format is not valid you'll get an alert right away. That has to be done by Javascript. The problem we face is that we can't trust the origin of our forms so any validation we do in Javascript , we still have to redo in PHP when the whole form is validated. This creates a lot of code redundancy and we probably need to think about when we want it and when we don't.

montego · Posted: Sat Feb 16, 2008 6:48 am

fkelly, I keep going back to what if my site has 20K users??? The way I have seen this done is that nothing is brought back to the browser in the drop down until a user starts to type in the text field at least the first character, then using AJAX techniques, it can return back a much smaller list of users/emails...

fkelly · Posted: Sat Feb 16, 2008 11:29 am

M. I tested this on 15,000 users. Granted it bogs a bit but it still worked. That said I am definitely not opposed to using better techniques. Ya_dropdown was just put in as a stopgap until we could do something more fundamental with YA as a whole. I know that on my site with 1100 users it saves me incalculable time. Like Carlo I used to use PHPmyadmin to find a user or I even created an Excel spreadsheet of users and emails and I'd search that in a separate window. No more.

The next incremental step, in my view, would be to create a separate search function in YA/admin that could be responsive to a number of criteria: users created since date xxx, users on yyy email domain, string searches on username and or email and the like, users who have posted in the last nn days.

Beyond that maybe we could use Javascript with Ajax techniques to create something that integrates both user and group management. I'd love to see something where we could switch "views" from "users -- groups" to "groups -- users". Get a scrolling list of users for instance and be able to see what groups they are in and what groups are available and be able to create a "pending" update for the whole system by dragging or clicking users to the groups you want them in, review the update and accept or modify it. Or have a scrolling list of groups that shows what privileges the group has and what users belong to it and then add users from a separate list.

Definitely we are going to want to use Javascript and Ajax for that.

Gremmie · Posted: Sat Feb 16, 2008 12:10 pm

I'm struggling with this right now with my Google Members Map. Right now I just dump all users down to the browser in javascript datastructures. That may not scale well, so I may need to do some smarter fetching on demand later. But your 15,000 test makes me feel a little better.

fkelly · Posted: Sat Feb 16, 2008 7:42 pm

Gremmie, I think that both M. and yourself are absolutely right to be concerned about the scalability of an approach that dumps large amounts of data to Javascript data structures. As in so many of these things there is probably no one size fits all answer. If you have users fill out a search box and submit it to the server then you get a full page load of Nuke. Depending on the number of blocks active and other factors you are getting probably over 100 SQL calls to reload the page when you really are just after data from one or two tables. If you are using Ajax, then you may have a constant back and forth with the server that has its own resource implications.