InfoQube IM - Community

Submitted by Tom on 2011/06/28 10:46

I'm wondering if anyone else is successfully working with a grid with 1000+ top level items?

I have a grid with roughly 2500 TLIs

"minor" usability issues:

often clicking on an item will cause the focus to change to an item at the other end of the grid - this is a royal pain, having to relocate where you were... This seems to be common - I know superboyac was complaining about it before.

There were others minor but I'm bogged down with the one below.

Major usability issue:

ability to move items - I decided to move about 2000 items under a TLI - by selecting and using Alt+Left arrow. I gave up waiting after 5 minutes of one core being hogged (I presume it just seized up - it did say "not responding").

I am now moving them a "page" at a time but it's still very slow, well, ~ 40 seconds, manageable, but when you've thousands of items...

With apologies if this has all been said before.

Just wondering if there's any tips - e.g. would it be any better if the was only one TLI?

also, there is conditional formatting in one field, would temporarily turning that off be of any help?

XP home - SP3 IQ Portable - up-to-date

Comments

I have the same experience. Re-organizing appears to lock the program but I never receive a report. It will clear after I make some tea, drink it and come back (really). My method is to cut the item(s) then paste them to the desired location. Certainly not ideal, especially when I misjudge and try to use the keyboard to promote the incorrectly positioned cut/paste operation. Then it goes comatose again.

Jon

Tom, I probably have as many TLI's but have not tried moving 1,000 at a time. However, I can say -- as jon did -- that whenever I've worked with even a reasonable group, I expect it to take too much time. Alternatively, I cut/paste or move by selecting # column, etc. No matter what, none of it is good enough performance wise IMO but I assume once Pierre gets all the pieces in place, he'll go back after performance. We tend to forget -- because the builds are generally so stable -- that we are still in beta. .....or at least, I do.

Thanks for the comments and tips guys.

I havent suffered from these performance problems before, cause, even though I do normally work with a lot of items in the grid, they are in a hierarchy which has built up over time.

Now I'm having to import excel files and then organise all at once...

Will have a go at cut n paste

[quote=Tom]

Will have a go at cut n paste[/quote]

oh oh!

more drama with copy / cut / paste - to be fair I'm a complete beginner when it comes to copy/paste, always have used drag n drop :-)

I select a lot of sub-items and cut:

Ctrl+X

I get a dialogue that says:

Copying Items [OK]

that runs for a minute (while I wonder should I press the active OK button or not)

Then I get an erase dialogue (- which makes me panic a bit - I dont want to erase anything !!)

Erase these 227 items?

1) Remove from this grid only

2) Remove from this parent only

3) Erase entirely...

4) Cancel

what's the difference between #1 & #2 ? I really dont know which to choose - in most grids they'd be the same thing I think...

Now I've managed to loose almost 700 items :-(

my fault,

but really this is totally confusing..... [edit] no worries - I restored a backup [/edit]

Pierre,

this is totally confusing -

complicated by the fact that no paste dialogue showed - probably due to the number of items, the last attempt they pasted as siblings (to a TLI) without asking (I had wanted to paste as sub-items).

I'm going to give up until I have time to experiment in order to better understand what actually happens (experimenting with hundreds of items at a time is not a good idea, for me at any rate..)

I think the main problem is whether to remove from grid or parent - it looks like parent is the correct choice but... [it could be possible that the items were sub-items and at top-level due to the paste dialogue not showing on an earlier attempt - but I just got so confused by the whole thing that I couldnt say for sure-]

it would be nice if it could work in the same way as windows explorer - cut and paste - the items get removed from their original location when they are pasted to their new position.

I can understand that this might not be possible, or maybe very difficult - if it's not possible, the dialogues could be made a lot clearer and hopefully a lot simpler...

(my two cents as they say)

Tom, Try this: select group, mark them in some way (new field = copied or whatever), then paste to new location, then retun to delete. But, I agree experimenting w small selection vs a lot of items as IQ seems to have problems digesting big moves.

with apologies for the frantic in progress posts:

I'll try a summary of what I think happened:

Cut TLI's & Paste as sub-items

I select remove from grid from the "Erase" dialogue, but this was presumably not successful as the items sill all ticked for source field. Items show twice.

Cut sub-items and Paste as TLI's - remove parent link was unsuccessful, items show twice

Select multiple items => Remove parent link from the PP -- unsuccessful

Paste dialogue not shown when pasting large number of items (200+)

I renamed two TLIs and pasted multiple items as sub-items of one of them - Renaming of TLI is undone after cut and past of multiple items. I am unable to rename - it changes back after a refresh - at this stage I close the programme

Maybe it's just one of those days :-)

EDIT/ added the line about the paste dialogue

XP home - SP3 IQ Portable - up-to-date

Hi Tom,

1- About the "cut" dialog / operation

I noted the same thing a while ago (I don't remember when and thought it was in Mantis but it's not).

1.1 Suggestion: Remove any dialog for "cut" operations (except for the "operation confirmation" popup)

I.e.: IQ shouldn't offer any other option such as "Erase entirely from grid", etc..

"Erase item" is confusing since cut is not a "deletion operation" per se, even if their might be overlap in the 2 operations.

1.2 Corollaries... IQ should instead...

1.2.1 transparently remove the item from the current grid when item(s) is/are TLI

(of course, that might be a challenge for complex sources, but there's nothing new there)

1.2.2 transparently remove the current item parent link if items are subitems (at their "cut location")

1.2.3 items should never be deleted from the DB in a "cut" operation.

If a user wants to delete an item, she/he should use delete (ctrl+e)!

2- About performance :

... I agree it needs to be improved. In that area and others.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Windows XP Home Edition, Service pack 2

Dell Vostro 1500, Ram:3gb, CPU:Core2Duo T7500 2.2ghz

[quote=Armando]

... IQ should instead...

1.2.1 transparently remove the item from the current grid when item(s) is/are TLI

(of course, that might be a challenge for complex sources, but there's nothing new there)

1.2.2 transparently remove the current item parent link if items are subitems (at their "cut location")[/quote]

of course these should first be done when the items are pasted - that way if you cut, but then decide to NOT paste, there is no problem.

About the other problems you had... I haven't got the time to test. But you had them so they're obviously real!

Maybe later today.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Windows XP Home Edition, Service pack 2

Dell Vostro 1500, Ram:3gb, CPU:Core2Duo T7500 2.2ghz

[quote=Armando]

About the other problems you had... I haven't got the time to test. But you had them so they're obviously real!

Maybe later today. [/quote]

thanks Armando - but to be honest I was so addled by the whole thing that I would not trust my reporting as a bug report.

It's more a record of how challenging the cut / paste interface is to someone who hasnt used it before...

Also after an IQ restart things worked a bit better.

In v0.9.25U, moving items in the hierarchy has been considerably optimized, so it is much faster !

(the issue was linked to parent-child calculations)

[quote=Pierre_Admin]

In v0.9.25U, moving items in the hierarchy has been considerably optimized, so it is much faster !

(the issue was linked to parent-child calculations)

[/quote]

Hi Pierre, it's certainly a lot more stable, and it works!

I'm working from a usb stick on a Win7 laptop at the moment (as my poor computer is dead in the corner...).

It takes 2.5 minutes to move 450 items using Alt+Right-Arrow - from top level.

The time doesnt bother me (and could be partly due to usb connection) - it's seldom I'd be moving so much stuff - but it does happen, like now :)

But there is no indication that anything is happening (Windows 7 SP1). This would be very helpful, as it's tempting to give up when operations take a long time.

EDIT / PS - I was up to roughly 4,500 TLIs, it was working okay but scrolling was a pain - not IQ's fault! Focus regularly jumping to somewhere completely different in the grid though was a big challenge. I'm able to move them under about 10 "headings" so that will help.