AutoSearch Criterias - Improvements

rbuser

Hi,

I am using RB for years and I can say that it is a very good product but I
am not so happy about AutoSearch criteria.
They are useful to allow end-user to specify data they are looking for but,
honestly, they are very poor in terms of user friendly.
What I would like to see improved are:

1) Have the possibility to pick values from another table.
A lot of time you have a field that has a lookup table so it would be so
nice to have the possibility to specify the table name/field name from wich
pick the value.

2) Have the possibility to specify a description for the autoserach
criteria to display in the dialog box.
Now there is this possibility modifying the alias for the field you specyify
to be autosearch but once you do it, you have to refer the field with the
alias in the RAP. From the programmer point of view, it is better to
continue to use the field name as specified in the DB instead the alias.

3) Have the possibility to use complex selection criteria for the field.
At the moment, when you define an Autosearch field, you can specify which
kind of operator you wand to use (<, >, >=, Between, In list, etc). It could
be better to just specify a field as autoserach and have the possibility to
do any kind of selection you want. I have developed a dialog box that it is
created dinamically based on a "SelectOptions" class I defined and it
generates automatically an SQL where clause with complex expression.
I use it in a normal reports development (using a form with report
component, TSQLQuery, etc). If you want to have a look at it, I could send
it to the support and see if it could be possible to include in a next
release as end-user solution.

I know that there is the possibility to develop a custom dialog for end-user
solution but it is hard to develop one of it for each end-user report. Nice
to have these features natevely in an end-user solution.

Thanks
Antonio Budano
www.altairnet.com

digitalmetaphors

1. & 3. Yes, you have to create a custom autosearch dialog to do lookups:
http://www.digital-metaphors.com/tips/CustomAutosearchDialogRB7.zip

2. You can change the description that is displayed in the search dialog by
changing the TppAutosearchField.FieldAlias. Then in RAP, you can check for
Autosearch.FieldName which is what you have defined on the database or use
your assigned field alias by AutosearchField.FieldAlias.

Thanks for the suggestions.

Jim Bennett
Digital Metaphors

rbuser

Jim,

I know that creating a custom autosearch dialog it is possible to solve part
of the wishes I have.
I wanted to look at the possibility to have that features included in the
standard end-user environment.
Any possibility to have some of them in next releases of RB?

Could I help?

Thanks
Antonio

rbuser

What I liked to have with AutoSearchFields:

- Set the description in the designer at report-designtime
- have the ability to set a tag ( I would like to use the tag to create
special autosearchfields; Tag = 100 --> use a picklist with ) or any other
mechanism to signal what fields are needed.


Not really AutoSearchFields:
- I would like to edit part of the SQL, e.g. to use a function call when
joining, but still use the AutoSearchFeature

Thank you.

Bernd

digitalmetaphors

It requires a little coding, but you can use dataviews that have edited SQL
with autosearch. You'll have to follow the standard autosearch demos
technique. Here is a tip I created:

http://www.digital-metaphors.com/tips/EditSQLandSearch.zip

Cheers,

Jim Bennett
Digital Metaphors

rbuser

Link is not working...

B.

digitalmetaphors

It works for me. Perhaps the webserver connectivity was down temporarily? We
rebooted the machine this morning so there were a few minutes that it was
down. Try downloading it again.


Cheers,

Jim Bennett
Digital Metaphors

rbuser

Hi Jim,


the server wasn't available for hours, now all looks fine.

Cheers,
Chris Ueberall;