Alphabet Button vs Search by Name - force either/or

[WendyWelton]

My application will be a public web site. I've been testing usability on clients in house. If they've pushed an alphabet button, they will then try to do a search by plan name - get nothing if first letter is different. Clear Search doesn't clear an alphabet button.

If this were a company management web site, I'd say we just tell them how to do it. But this is thousands of anonymous guests - and having to teach causal browsers how to use your web site is the kiss of death. I've literally watched every single person I test this on step on the same land mine.

So - my question:

Does anybody know how to either:

1 - Have entering anything in the Name search field automatically set the Alphabet to All.

2 - Some other way around this that I haven't thought of.

And because a picture is still worth a thousand words:

[Davidk]

Re: Alphabet Button vs Search by Name - force either/or

This seems to work for me... at least the way I'm reading your message.

In the Grid Properties, System Events, afterSearchSubmit

{grid.Object}.alphabetSearch(37);

37 represents "All" when all the Alphabet buttons are there, plus the numbers. So... if numbers are not included the SearchId would be 27. It looks like the search is being submitted from the Search Grid, then the "All" button is fired, leaving the Search Grid parameters in place.

[WendyWelton]

Re: Alphabet Button vs Search by Name - force either/or

Thanks. That works to clear the whole alphabet with any search - which is "close enough for govermint work".

Eventually I may try to have it clear the alphabet only when the Name field is used, not the others. But that's another dragon for another day. For now - this cures a land mine.

[clivevdmescht]

Re: Alphabet Button vs Search by Name - force either/or

I'm having a similar issue, but I open a grid in a model window based on an on click event. The grid that is opened displays a list of composers linked to a particular music publisher. I then use the Alphabet buttons to navigated through the list. When I close the grid and click on a new Music Publisher (to display the composers) the list is automatically filtered based on the last Alphabet value clicked.

I've tried the above and placed the code everywhere, but I can't seem to find the correct way of doing this.

[frankbicknell]

Re: Alphabet Button vs Search by Name - force either/or

This seems to work for me... at least the way I'm reading your message.

In the Grid Properties, System Events, afterSearchSubmit

{grid.Object}.alphabetSearch(37);

37 represents "All" when all the Alphabet buttons are there, plus the numbers. So... if numbers are not included the SearchId would be 27. It looks like the search is being submitted from the Search Grid, then the "All" button is fired, leaving the Search Grid parameters in place.

Thanks for that solution David. Do you know of a way to test to see if the ALL button is already pressed?

[Ken Tjia]

Re: Alphabet Button vs Search by Name - force either/or

this this apply to custom search button?
assuming we have 6 buttons.. then we use ?

{grid.Object}.alphabetSearch(6);

i need to test it once more...

[cFlat7]

Re: Alphabet Button vs Search by Name - force either/or

We had a similar requirement where we had three custom buttons and wanted the first button to be defaulted when the user first opens the grid.

The following works if used in the OnGridRenderComplete client event but has the undesired effect of first displaying all the records:

{grid.Object}.alphabetSearch(1);

With some help from Selwyn, we found a nice solution and that was to define a user filter in the action that opens the grid in the first place (in our case, the Tabbed User Interface) -- the user filter just needs to match the filter that the default alphabet button would use. We were then able to remove the above client side event that clicks the button.