Re: pgAdmin 4 1.0-beta4 - Query Tool, Select file popup issues

Hi

On Tue, Oct 25, 2016 at 7:22 PM, vnicolici <vladnc(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> Hello. I just started using pgAdmin 4, and first of all let me say it looks
> very promising. Works much better on high DPI displays.

Thanks.

> And I especially like that it is no longer affected so much by high latency
> network connections. The old pgAdmin really struggled when the database was
> on a different continent than the client computer. It seems pgAdmin III was
> doing a lot of round trips over the network for some operations.

That was one of the most important changes for us. Even if there is a
connection failure, recovery should be as seamless as possible.

> That being said, I think there is still room for improvement for the user
> interface. In particular, I don't think replacing the native operating
> system file open dialog was the greatest idea. This introduces a lot of
> limitations, and even the stuff that works has some issues.
>
> My greatest problem with the file dialog is that you can't paste a
> file/folder path in it. Or copy the current path for that matter. Or type
> the file path manually in any way.
>
> Aside from the inconvenience of having to navigate manually, that means
> that, on Windows, you can't open a file directly from a network share that
> is not mapped to a drive letter. Or save it directly to a network share. Or
> navigate to a network share folder, because you can't type a file path like
> \\host\share\folder\folder\file.sql
>
> Also you can't open a file directly from the web, because you can't enter
> something like http://host/path/file.sql in the dialog box.
>
> And finally, when navigating through the folders/drives using the current
> version (1.0), double clicking on the folder/drive icons doesn't seem to
> work. You have to double click on the folder name/drive name. Also the
> dialog opens quite slowly.
>
> So, in my opinion, if technically feasible, the decision to replace the
> native OS file open dialog with a platform independent dialog should be
> reversed. I think the problems it introduces outweigh any benefits.

I wouldn't be so sure about that :-/. There are various problems with
using native file dialogues - firstly, they won't work at all in
server mode where you actually need to browse the filesystem on the
server, not the client. Secondly, for security reasons browsers
(including webkit which is used in our desktop runtime) seriously
limit what can be done with files on the client. As a simple example,
if you edit a query that you loaded from a file in the query tool, you
couldn't just hit "Save" and carry on. You'd have to hit Save, then
use the native dialogue to download the file and save it. It would be
significantly more cumbersome.

So, I can't see us using native dialogues except in a few simple cases
where you really are downloading something (e.g. some query results).
However, I certainly do want us to improve the file management to
support features like you suggest.

--
Dave Page
Blog: http://pgsnake.blogspot.com
Twitter: @pgsnake

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