AdvancedFieldPicker feedback

[senordhuff]

Hello,

I see from some other posts that the AdvancedFieldPicker is not going to be fully supported until Smartclient 9.0. However, I just tried it out with 8.3 and thought I'd offer some feedback. We are very interested in using this feature once it is fully supported so wanted to make sure to get feedback to you now.

1. It looks like the Sample Values columns in the Field Picker are populating with corrupted values when the grid is grouped.

2. Can you make it easy to sort the list of available fields alphabetically by default if we choose?

3. Can you allow for hover text over all fields to show the field.prompt value? That is a change you made for the normal column chooser for 8.3 that is very nice and should be in the Advanced Field Picker as well.

4. If there is any way to allow the Advanced Field Picker to show a Tree Grid of fields where Fields can be further categorized into groups, that would be great. In the past, we've built our own Custom Menu to allow us to categorize the Columns further because, with so many columns, they need to be organized into groups or the list becomes overwhelming. There are so many promising features with this Advanced Column Picker that we'd love to switch over to using it. But, we'd need the ability to do this grouping still.

[Isomorphic]

Hi
We looked into this and it was relatively low effort to achieve the first three requested changes so these are now in place:
1) Grouped grids no longer show garbled sample values
2) The "availableFields" grid is now sorted by default. This is controlled by a (currently undocumented) property of the FieldPicker class - fieldPicker.sortAvailableFields
3) Any fields with a specified "prompt" will now show that prompt in a hover canvas when you hover over the associated record in either the available fields grid or current fields grid. This is controlled by a property "fieldPicker.showFieldPrompts".

These changes will all show up in the next nightly build on the 8.3p branch.

We are looking into your fourth question (RE showing the fields in a TreeGrid). We'll follow up on that separately.

Regards
Isomorphic Software

[senordhuff]

Thanks, I will check out those enhancements soon. On the grouped grid idea, what we did was add some additional nested tags to the Datasource file to determine the grouping like you see below...

<headerMenu>
<title>Exposure</title>

<headerMenu>
<title>Optimal</title>
</headerMenu>

</headerMenu>

There is probably some better way but it worked to allow us to go a few levels deep.

[Isomorphic]

On #4: We don't currently support this feature in the framework and it's not something we can simply "switch on" unfortunately.
If you'd like a framework solution for this, it would be eligible for feature sponsorship - just let us know. The other option is to come up with an application level solution. It sounds like you've already got something in place for this - if it's working for you that's great!

Regards
Isomorphic Software