Re: PATCH: Improve status bar in Edit Data window

Hello Dave,

Thursday, January 2, 2014, 4:01:47 PM, Dave Page wrote:

>> 1000 rows LIMIT
>> 1000 rows LIMIT, FILTER
>> 797 rows, FILTER
>> Will that help distracted users?

DP> I think adding a bright yellow warning exclamation would be a good
DP> idea too. Something like:

DP> /!\ Data filtered
DP> or
DP> /!\ Rows limited

Trying to imagine,.. that is a bitmap? Would it appear in "rows" pane
in the status bar or in a new pane (how would it relate to "rows" and
"description" panes)?

>> name, character varying(80) (NOT NULL): Person's full name

DP> Not entirely sure I like that. It at least partially duplicates what's
DP> already in the header row (and gets it wrong, in the case of a serial
DP> column). I would be inclined to display just the column description in
DP> the status bar, and extend the markers in the header to include "NN",
DP> and "DEF" as they currently do for "PK". Or something like that.

Sure, "serial" will be fixed.

I've done a quick screenshot-based search on how this looks in some
popular DBMS-related tools:
Oracle SQL Developer
AllroundAutomations PL/SQL Developer
EMS SQL Manager
PostgreSQL Maestro
MS SQL Server Management Studio
Quest Software Toad for Oracle
Embarcadero DBArtisan
Sequel Pro
Navicat
SQLBuddy
I haven't found any one (except PgAdmin) to have some column metadata
shown in the column header when viewing/editing table data. Everyone
shows nothing but the column name in the header!
Also I recall my first experience with PgAdmin in 2006 - this
distinction was noticed.

So possibly, many UI designers of the products above came to similar
conclusions:
1. Column header is too small and can't present much information without
distracting the user.
2. Further column metadata (even data type) is less significant
to most users and can be placed to some "background" location (status
bar) or even totally removed.

May be it's not so bad to duplicate column name & datatype, as a first
step to introduce new feature and hopefully get some user's feedback?
That area in the status bar is unused anyway...

>> 3. And by the way, I want to ask to loosen restriction on minimal size
>> for Edit Data window. Sometimes a user has to look at just a few
>> records in several reference tables, but they hardly fit the screen
>> because of their min height.

DP> I have no problem with that, but it needs to take into account whether
DP> or not the scratch pane is visible, and be able to deal with it
DP> properly if the user turns the scratch pane back on, when the window
DP> is small.

Ok, I'll check this.

--
Best regards,
J.F.