Suggestion: improve inline edit plugin

[Iko]

I was happy to find the inline edit plug in, played with it, and want to make some suggestions:

1. right now, it opens as a menu and with menu styling, which may or may not be fine - does not look great with bullet list in a standard joomla - beez2 template.
2. i would not put a menu at all, and do it all with keys only.. no need to show the field name, it's in the column header
3. put the edit field/drop down in place of the original value
4. when hitting tab, save the value (which you do, even when that option is off) but also open the next editable field in the row...
5. add a second ADD button to add an inline row skipping the need to go into forms
6. prepopulate filtered fields with the filter value... this helps with related master-detail lists (when you hand build a master detail list using the content plugin)

Thanks for your consideration.

 

[Iko]

two more things:

7. Calc fields are R/O and cannot be edited in form view, they should not open inline edit
8. you could also consider adding a ROW EDIT button at the row end and then put input fields for all editable fields (similar to how phpMyAdmin does it)

o.k. enough for now ;-)

 

[rob]

1 - I fixed the styling as of today
2 - not 100% sure what you mean regarding keys? You can always add some custom css to hide the element label if you want.
3 - this is troublesome as some elements take up a lot more space than the data which is shown for them in the list, hence the need to display the inline edit content in a window.
4 - hmm not sure I like that idea! you can press enter to edit the row, triggering a load call on ever up/down/left/right would be annoying
5 - see what you mean, but this would be difficult, we have an ajax form option already which should suffice to enable users to add records without leaving the page.
6 - that sounds very odd, perhaps I don't understand what you mean. Surely the field is populated with the data for the row you are editing?
7 - I'm not sure thats 100% true, calc elements can be editable - if you dont want to inclued it you can set up the list of elements that are editable in the inline edit plugins settings
8 -

 

[Iko]

2- keyboard operations only.. most of what I am suggesting is actually an "editable grid". It would be helpful to have the option to edit master detail views, where the master is a form and the details are a grid (like in a spreadsheet). That's often the most productive way of data entry.
3- look at phpMyAdmin... does not look too bad (I guess this can be achieved by modifying the form template for the details data (in a master-detail scenario))
6- this is for adding new records... if the list was created using a filter on the same rowID as the parent (remember you gave me the idea to edit a form template and use the content plugin), then any new records should have the ID already populated

 

[cheesegrits]

Re 3. As Rob mentioned, it's not that simple for us, as many of our element edit views take up a lot more space than the list representation. phpMyAdmin has a much simpler job, as it only ever has to handle simple string inputs, with the same "footprint" as the list representation.

Imagine what the phpMyAdmin edit view would look like, if one column was a 50 pixel wide static map (or a numeric lat/lon), and the 'edit' view of that was a 600 pixel wide active map. And another column was a radio button result of one short word, but the edit view was a 50 button selection radio list.

-- hugh

 

[Iko]

And I agree that certain fields need some form of popup with more screen real estate, a date selector would be another example... however, for many applications a good data entry grid would be most efficient, column layout with header etc and fast navigation between cells.

 

[cheesegrits]

It's something we've thought about, and will probably look at implementing at some point. The way I would imagine it working would be we would add a per-element property that specifies whether the element types supports 'grid' edit mode. So things like simple field elements would support it, but (say) maps and upload elements definitely wouldn't.

But it's not something which is going to happen overnight. The whole 'inline edit' thing is very much "Work in Progress", which we work on as and when we have time.

-- hugh

 

[Iko]

let me share with you what i intend to do, and maybe you can recommend the best way of doing this with the current version of F.

Basically I have Missions (Search and Rescue) with a few details such as location, type of mission, incident commander, date, etc. This info can be presented and edited in a regular form.

Then for each mission I have a responder roster. People that show up and help with the rescue effort. That should be a list of people with a few fields, time in, time out, hours, miles driven, unit, and role. This should be edited in tabular form.

Should I create a separate form template or can I achieve it with column settings?

Thanks in advance

 

[cheesegrits]

Well, as we've established the 'inline edit' probably isn't ready for prime time yet.

The way I would probably approach this would be to create a second table for responders, and set up a database join (one to many, i.e. with Repeat set to yes).

Then I would create a custom form template, which renders the repeat group elements in a single row, rather than in standard vertical format.

So then when you edit the "Mission", you'd see the Responder info in pseudo table. Actually, you could make a "real" HTML table, in your custom template, by replacing our UL / LI structure with TABLE, TR and TD's.

-- hugh

 

[Iko]

I'll give that a shot. As an alternative, I could probably have people edit rosters in Excel and just import them. Then I could use the regular list format as a R/O content in the Master Form.

 

[jigmode]

Where can i download this inline edit plugin?