Friendly Alphabet Filtering
As a developer, it’s often hard to get out of a mindset where your response of “It’s simple silly, you just search for a portion of the word, not the whole word.” to the question of a particular search not providing a user’s expected results.
This type of response may come from a user when they mention they know the user “Petrowsky” is in the database but it doesn’t come across verbally that they’re really searching for “Petrowski” - which obviously doesn’t match the version ending in a “y” instead of an “i”.
This level of understanding, that you can simply enter “petrow” in order to search for both variations, isn’t inherently obvious to all users. So the next best solution is to provide some type of filtering process. Something where the user can narrow down their list of choices to find out where the disconnect is happening.
In this video, we look at a sublimely simple script which makes this type of task an utter piece-of-cake. If you’ve got users who need to make routine selections on filtered subsets of data then the knowledge contained within this video will pay dividends beyond just knowing how to filter based on an alphabet letter!
Comments
improvements?
if you get no results back, then beep and show all?
if you get back one result, close the popover, or show the one result in the popver - which obscures the record so you can't see the result anyway..?
once you have fewer than, say, 10 results, change the behaviour to start filtering down based on the letters entered not just the first?
Lessons from filemakerstandards.org
Because every developer has a different idea of what they want to have happen based on a zero found, set I typically go for the lowest common denominator. All of your suggestions are good ones!
-- Matt Petrowsky - ISO FileMaker Magazine Editor
Fantastic!
This is so simple to implement, but give the user an amazing power to fillter the found count.
This is why I am a member for these kinds of files
Thank you once again Matt.
Craig