Adding New Records to a Filtered Grid

alanjfpaterson

I need to ask as many of you as possible to make suggestions for this 'problem'.

Imagine that you are looking at a typical screen with a grid and many records. You apply a record filter - it doesn't matter what the filter is - let's say it is all records with account code 6000. So the grid now is showing only those records where the account code is 6000.

Now you click the New button. You can probably guess what the issue is!! Our typical NewRow code runs and creates a new row in the data set - but if it doesn't match the filter, the row will not be visible and what will happen is that the first row will get highlighted and its details displayed. Users will get very confused by that I think. So my question is - what do you think is the correct response from the code??

We will know that the record is not in the grid so we could put up a message box and offer to:

Remove the filter so that all rows are displayed
Undo the New Row operation
Modify the fields so that they fit the filter (that may be ambitious - and anyway as you edit the fields in the new row it might suddenly disappear!)

Or we could just turn the filter off as part of clicking New. That also might be unexpected - and possibly even annoying.

You may even have better ideas than any of these, which is why I really want to solicit your opinions before I code anything. I do realise that none of you have seen Filtering yet so you are having to use your imagination - but I think the issue is fairly simple - what I need is a profound solution!!

Thank you everyone.

Alan

ctopenpetra

Hi Alan

What I have seen done is in this context is that a new record is added at the bottom/top of the filtered record set but the new record is not affected by the filter constraints until the user reapplies the filter. This way, the user gets the best of both worlds.

The problem is, can the grid handle that? Probably not.

What I would do is remove the filter (which is shown graphically by the state of the filter button) and add the new record, but have a button that allows the user to re-apply the most recent filter.

In thinking about that, are we going to have a drop-down list of named filters that the user commonly uses and can easily create? So, after adding a new record they can go to the named filter list and select a previously saved filter name or at the top of the filter list click on <Most recent filter>

Just some thoughts

Chris

christiankatict

Hi Chris,

while the solution you reported would be very nice from a Users' point of view I can not easily imagine how that should be solved with our Grid being bound to a DataView and that DataView being filtered --- the Grid cannot show 'extra' DataRows that aren't contained in the DataView, and even if it could, we would have no way of appending those rows generally at the bottom of the Grid as most Grids are sorted, and again, the sorting cannot be switched off for certain Rows!

The 'most recent filter' idea is a nice one indeed. But before going into such usability details we have 'bigger fish to fry', and I would wait until users really would strongly want such a feature before implementing it.

Thanks,

ChristianK