Making information available at the table level for most customers would
make things more confusing that useful. You have to remember that
field names are not necessarily representative of what they do.
> If you were to have two drop down boxes in a row. The first one would be a
> drop-down list of the fields in the table. Then, once you pick a value from
> that drop-down box, it loads all unique values in the table for that field
> into the other drop-down box. Which then the user would pick the value they
> wanted to search for... then hit enter, "Search", whatever..and the SQL
> statement to find accounts would be derived off of what was in those boxes.
> That would allow for very precise searching and if you were to combine two
> or three lines of those and an and/or box between each line, it would make
> for some really nice "power searching".
>
> I just know that I am constantly having to fire up my "MS Query" tool (i'm
> not extremely proficient with doing straight sql statements in ISQL_w yet :)
> to try and find things that the Billing group asks for. I know that if there
> were a tool like this, it would allow me to show them how to look the stuff
> up theirselves and I wouldn't be bothered with it :)
We have thought about doing this with some specific fields from the
MasterAccounts and SubAccounts table, but rather than using the field
name, we will present a easy to understand phrase for field. I would
be interested in hearing what fields you are searching on that are
not available right now. If you are searching on specific data, its
probably better to make a CR report out of it for the other people to
simply run, then try and give them a search systems to always configure.
> I'd love to give more suggestions and even some diagrams of my ideas if your
> actually interested. I am pleased with this program a great deal, I just
> think some of the aesthetics could be worked on a bit to make it more user
> friendly for a broader population of users.
Please feel free to. We are also working on more reports for V3 and I
would
be interested in what reports people would like to see included with
Emerald.
--Dale E. Reed Jr. Emerald and RadiusNT__________________________________________IEA Software, Inc. www.iea-software.com