logo

New Response

« Return to the main article

You are replying to:

    • avatar
    • laurens
    • Posted on Sat 13 Mar 2004

    Dear Steve,

    Good points in your feedback. Some feedback on your feedback.

    [1] Sortable Columns "In order for the sorting to work the table would need to include all the documents. In the real world, it often takes too long to generate and download a single view page that shows all the documents"

    The reason why the light-weight views and sorting are combined in the article, is because light-weight render fast enough to contain large quantities of data. These large tables can contain the whole logical subset of a database. A view with may be a thousand records can be part of a HTML page not larger than 100 KB.

    Most web pages, Notesbased or other, don't contain large tables. I have never understood that, in Excel and in the Notes client users don't seem to mind to work with large tables. There are no Next and Previous buttons in Excel, but Google's default still is 10 search results. The forums on Notes.net show 100 records, and the contents of the forum submissions differ much. In a company directory, as a user, I wouldn't mind loading a 100KB page with all employees listed on it.

    What I try to do when designing applications is to create logical cuts in views, e.g. split employees by A-Z, by office, by organizational unit etc. and all other views that people like. On average, pages will stay small (<1000 records). And you don’t need the ugly twisties this way, categories of categorized views are opened by simple links with “? openview&restricttocategory=A” in them.

    [2] Minimizing calculations in views “This is a good idea to keep the views running fast. But in some cases pre-calculating causes other problems.”

    You are totally right, in some cases they may cause problems. In the example database we use the href to the document (URL) as a calculated field, a fairly basic calculation. This is just intended as an example, and may not work in all situations. In the case of copying documents a @IsNewDocument formula could solve your specific problem.

    [3] Exporting to Excel “I have seen with some SSO add-ons that the view data can never be retrieved in Excel since Excel is not a browser and doesn't act appropriately.”

    In my opinion, it is a design feature Excel lacks. I know there are many programs that can properly read cookies and sent them in their requests. But getting around limitations is one of our jobs as a designer:

    I have one webapplication that is based on hiding/displaying an empty subform/ the appropriate subform with the data depending on the availability of a cookie. The view that is exported to excel, is created as a seperate view with a different $$ViewTemplate. In this $$ViewTemplate I use a validation on the value of a HTTP_Referer field to hide/display the contents of the view. When I type in the url of the view in the webbrowser, the empty subform is displayed, but when the url of the view is requested by clicking on the HREF to the .iqy file, it displays the data in Excel. Don’t ask me why, it works. May be you could also design such extra views with $$ViewTemplates and mark them as “Available to public access users”

    [4] Categorized Views “The methods described here don't take into consideration that many applications have views that are categorized. A solution might be to use a Single Category View with a choice list to change the category but that gets tough when the view has more then one level of categorization.”

    It took me more than a year to stop thinking like a Notes developer. Categorized views, and twisties, are effective in a Notes client, you seldom see Categorized views on the web. It is the role of a developer to present information in usefull ways. Yahoo’s home page a good example of how to present categories in a web style manner.

Your Comments

Name:
E-mail:
(optional)
Website:
(optional)
Comment: