Am not sure on how to do this but I will describe it and hopefully you all can come up with a good solution. I want to have a box (not sure if its an input of search box) that when someone types in the box it pulls values from my database and shows the closest match based on characters being typed in. If the word that is typed by the user is not there then when the form is submitted then the word is added to a database.
Additionally I want to have an add button next to the box, so that if the user wants to add more than one word they can. This means that when the add is clicked a duplicate of the first box appears which does the same thing. The values will be stored in an array.
Any idea how I can go about doing this?
Related
in my original workbook i want to display some values from another sheet for multiple actions.. so i put drop down list for each actions. but when the actions increased i couldn't recognize each formulas. (all of them are import range) so that if i can name each formulas in the drop down then i can recognize fast which action to be performed. here a sample sheet is attached for a solution.. pls take a look. in the dropdown list i included (=a2+b2) instead of that if it displayed as addition in drop down list would be help ful. please take a look.
sorry for my english
Any type of help would be appreciated.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1mpIWyQASMlxRVdlTkv9K1e4oihsrckjT6sD1mLDxvEc/edit#gid=0
If I understand correctly, you want to have a dropdown list menu (from Data Validation) that displays the operation name, but when you click it, it displays just the result.
This is very hacky, but here's a way to create some "labels" in your criteria box:
=IF(;"ADDITION";A2+B2),
=IF(;"SUBTRACTION";A2-B2),
=IF(;"DIVISION";A2/B2),
=IF(;"MULTIPLICATION";A2*B2),
How?(!)
After kicking around some no-op ideas, I finally settled on this as the cleanest and most flexible approach. (By some freak coincidence, it also makes some semantic sense too.) It works because when the first argument to IF is omitted, it defaults to 0 -> FALSE. This effectively makes the second argument to IF a comment/no-op, and always just selects the formula.
Yes, the semicolons are intentional or the parser will think of the args as list items.
Productivity Tip/Footnotes
Sheets will remove any line breaks in your validation criteria, so the formula will be hard to read when you have to edit it. If you anticipate that you'll be adding a bunch of functions later, save the above block in a text file and edit that. Then you can copy+paste it into the validation field.
It will also always show up as "INVALID" because the value will of course never match the formula text.
I'm building a searching sheet, which take a dropdown cell as input data. User can select from the list, or type in the key word. Searched data will be populated by rows/column with my query formula. The search result itself works just fine.
However, the drop down list doesn't.
Here's a picture of my search.
As you can see in the picture, autocomplete would only populate 6 items, while my search query produce much more, which is exactly what I need. It's clear enough : Autocomplete compare the whole text, not word - by - word.
Is there anyway to change this behavior ?
My sheet is for other people to look for a specific item. I cannot expect them to know what I have entered in my database and force them to search by those exact keywords.
Anything from script to formula is fine with me. I just need at least, a lead..
When choosing 'Add' in CRUD, how best to generate a list of choices to pick from a dropdown?
For U/update - just display what's there...
The field contents starts with a letter, followed by five numeric digits:{A-I,K-N,Z}#####
Each letter has a different 'max' value for the numeric part.
So when adding a new record, I'd like to offer a listbox with one of each letter and that letter's highest numeric value + 10.
So, if the max 'A' as A00120, and max 'B' B00030 (etc) the listbox would have A00130 and B00040.. etc
Save the user having to figure out which is 'next' when generating a new record.
? Thanks,
Mark
This time I'll not be able to come up with ready to use solution, but I must say - everything is possible with ATK4. You just have to customize and extend it to fit your needs :)
Speaking about your question above - I guess you have to split it in multiple parts.
First part is about how to show select box on Create and readonly or disabled field on Update. I guess you can make some custom Form field or pin some action to existing Form Field hook. Not sure exactly what's better in this case.
Second one is about data structure. I believe that this field actually should be 2 fields in DB and maybe (only maybe) merged together in ATK model with addExpression() just for user interface needs to display these 2 fields as one field easily in UI. Maybe such concatenated field will be useful also for searching, but definitely not as only one field stored in DB. Imagine how hard it'll be for DB engine to find max value if such field. Store it like type = letter, num = number and then search like SELECT max(num)+10 FROM t WHERE type='A'
Finally Third part is about how to generate this next number. I read your question 3 times and came to conclusion that actually you don't have to show this +10 numeric value in UI at all if it's hardly predefined anyway. Actually that'll not work correctly if this will be multi-user system which I guess it will. Instead just show simple select box with letters {A-I,K-N,Z} and calculate this next value exactly before inserting data in DB. That can be done using models insert hook. This will be much more appropriate solution and will be better for UI and also more stable because calculated in model not incorrectly in UI part.
I've got a custom combo box descended from DevExpress's TdxfCustomComboBox. It works really well in most cases... and then I got a report from a client that when they try to open it it takes 3 seconds for the popup to appear. After a bit of investigation, I found out that that's because their database has about 12000 items that it's trying to populate, and it recreates the popup window and populates it each time.
This means that StdCtrls.TListBoxStrings.Add, which contains this line, gets called 12000+ times, once for each string.
SendMessage(ListBox.Handle, LB_ADDSTRING, 0, Longint(PChar(S)));
Processing this line requires several trips through multiple layers of message handlers and really bogs things down. I find this kind of silly since only about a dozen or so items are actually displayed in the popup window at once anyway. Does anyone know of a combo box control that doesn't require this sort of pre-loading and can scale?
EDIT: Unfortunately, making it not load 12,000 items is not an option here. The number of items in the combo box is based on the number of items in the database, and they all have to be available. Neither is making it into something other than a combo box. Not enough screen real estate for that.
the best solution that I can think of is using a TButtonEdit and when you click on the button a TVirtualStringTree(which is lightning fast) will popup containing the items, whenever the user clicks on a item the popup will close and the selected item will be displayed in the TButtonEdit's text property -- this can be achieved in a matter of minutes(5-10)
Another possibility: can you create the combo box at start-up and keep it around, reparenting it when you need it on this form?
Failing that, could you load the strings into another string list and .Assign to the combo box as necessary? (I'm not familiar with TListBoxStrings.)
Some options.
1./ Do you really have to populate with 12,000 items? can you use some filtering scheme and only return a subset of that data?
2./ Do you have to use a Combo box? do you have the screen real estate to use a virtual list view instead? (handle the storage and paging yourself)
3./ Create your own Virtual combo box...model the virtualization techniques on the virtual list view.
4./ Cheat...rather than a combo box, use a edit box with a "browse" button that opens a list that you can fill dynamically.
As far as I know there is no mode that lets you do this already with the dev express (or native) combo boxes.
ComboBoxes and ListViews experience performance degradation on an exponential curve, becoming really bad with thousands of items. Use Virtual lists whenever possible, if you have more than a few thousand.
Maybe you can use a LookupComboBox (also from DevExpress). Here you can load the data into a single DataSet where the Comboboxs are refering to it.
Honestly, three seconds sounds pretty good for loading 12000 records into a control like that.
Does the drop-down have to descend from TdxfCustomComboBox? I think you'd be better off rolling your own combo-box-like control here that would page through an associated dataset as required rather than pre-loading all the strings. Ideally you could build filtering into it too.
This is just a foolish design! A better option is to add a button which the user can click on. When he clicks on it, a new form opens with a connection to the options table and it will display all the options in the way you prefer. The user then has to select one, could use pageUp/PageDown and all kinds of filters because -of course- you'd be using a DBGrid to display the options and then the user clicks the "Select" button which will return the selected option back.A new form would provide all the space you would need!
From a design viewpoint, anyone considering a dropdown list with 12.000 options will be considered a fool by the users of this software! It would definitely make it very unpopular, no matter how fast you make it! Why, you say? Because users can't find what they need in a list that big without additional search options!
I have a SharePoint feature which programatically creates 3 lookups in a custom list, one from each of 3 different lists via extremely similar CAML markup.
The only differences in the CAML are the List, ID, Name, DisplayName and StaticName properties yet one of these lookups looks slightly different (has a slightly more "modern" drop-down arrow) than the other two and this same menu requires I double-click in order to select an item instead of single-clicking as I do with the other lookups.
Might anyone have seen this before and have an idea of what I might look into to make this lookup operate as a single-click menu?
The style of dropdown displayed is usually related to the number of items, although it also renders as a standard select element when viewed in firefox.
For any other field type it would make sense to create a custom field control, but due to code that expects things to be named "Lookup", lookup fields are next to impossible to extend.
The best way to customize a specific field is probably with javascript/jquery. When you click on the dropdown arrow, ShowDropdown (in core.js) is called. This creates a select element with options set from the pipe delimited list in the choices attribute of the textbox.
Add some code to the page so that on load EnsureSelect and FilterChoice or similar are called to create the select element. Set properties on the textbox and select elements so that the textbox as hidden and the select element is a visible dropdown. Have SetCtrlFromOpt called on change rather than on blur/double click so that the control that the server will read and save is properly updated.
The same approach could be used to keep the combo box but add a click event to set the value rather than requiring a double click.
How many items has the source list of every lookup field?
Lookup fields shows a "Combo" when the source list has 10 items (I'm not sure if 10 item is the exact limit). When the source list has more than 10 items the lookup field shows a "ListArea" control that works as you said.
I have exactly the same problem. One difference I have noticed is that the one listbox that requires a double-click is a lookup field, whereas the one that doesn't is a choice field with pre-populated choices. Don't know if that helps.