InfoQube IM - Community

Submitted by Anonymous on 2008/11/21 01:35

Well, I just had a whole list of these and managed to delete them from my bug/feature grid. So now undoing deletions is my new priority! :)

Be that as it may, I'm going to try to recreate these suggestions on the fly, because they are important to me.

When entering data I work strictly from the keyboard, if possible - a habit I picked up working in CP/M, MP/M, MS-DOS, Wang BDOS, and several other OS's before I ever encountered a graphical interface. It's a habit I probably won't be able to break at this late date, and wouldn't want to anyway because it's WAY more efficient than grabbing for a mouse every few seconds.

So what I'd really like to see in IQ are keyboard commands to both create new items (from anywhere on the grid) and position the cursor for data entry, as follows:

Create new top-level item and position focus at its first (left-most) field (Ctrl-< maybe)

Create new sibling for the currently-focused item and position focus at first field (Ctrl-| maybe)

Create child item to current item and position at first field (Ctrl-> maybe)

Now, I like to use sub-items as I would use subordinate tables in a relational database (for instance, line items in an invoice, somewhere in a grid). Therefore, for creating sub-items in that circumstance it would be extremely handy to have a command that created a new sub-item of the current item and positioned the cursor at some arbitrary field. The way I can see this happening is to use Ctrl-Shift-1, Ctrl-Shift-2, etc, to say "create new child item to the current item and place the focus in the nth field"

I can think of more if you want 'em... :) There actually WERE more before I went gonzo and blew up my grid.

Seriously, if I had these things I'd be a pretty damn happy camper, data entry-wise.

Regards,

Delta

Comments

[quote=DeltaFoxtrot]

Well, I just had a whole list of these and managed to delete them from my bug/feature grid. So now undoing deletions is my new priority! :)

[/quote]

Remember that items don't belong to grid, there are just displayed there. Most likely, the items are still in the database. (you've just changed TV channel... same tube, different content)

You can use the journal grid or CTRF-F

<sigh> Nope, I'm pretty sure they're history. I did that stuff already and no findee.

For some reason the same items were appearing twice in one grid. I assumed that I had somehow managed to make a copy of my data (I'm still not real clear on the copy/paste thing with this interface), and deleted the second occurrence - complete with answering affirmative to the "delete from database" question. Remember, it was pretty late for an old geezer like me. To my chagrin I then watched BOTH instances scroll off my screen and into the ether.

But oh well, if I had a nickel for each megabyte of information I've deleted over the years by accident/inattention I'd have several nickels more than I do at present... Believe me, I'm not nearly as concerned about that as I am about the original idea of this thread: adding useful methods of item creation + cursor/focus positioning. That issue to me is pretty much the crux of the useability issue with any program designed to hold and process large amounts of user-entered data. I type pretty fast, and I'm still always feeling the pressure of getting the information out of my brain, through my fingers, and into the system.

I can't emphasize enough, please give serious consideration to this question.

Thanks a million, and best regards,

Delta

Yup, I'll give good thoughts about your suggestions. Thanks

As for your deleted items, you may want to check the backups. If dated backup was enabled, you will still have the info in a backup and you could copy/paste it back