Some feedback after adding 150 database entries

  • atpresent

    (@atpresent)


    8 years ago

    Hi Roland,

    we just switched successfully to Participant Database, after having used a simple table-like layout before. I also installed the Combo Search which seems to work well. Here is some feedback which I would like to mention, after adding 150 entries manually. Some of it is probably already on your feature-request list:

    1. Provide copy-entry option in the “List Participant” menu

    It would be awesome if you could make copies of entries in the “List Participants” menu; at the moment you can only delete entries. We have a lot of entries that are very similar and making edits to the copies would have saved us some time.

    2. Provide token with Sample ID which you can use in any of the fields

    We created a details- and edit-link for each entry and made it part of one of the fields. Do to that we had to manually add the sample ID to the html link, for example

    wp-admin/admin.php?page=participants-database-edit_participant&id=14

    A much more flexible approach would be to provide a token such as [sampleid] and it would be easier to generate edit and details links:

    wp-admin/admin.php?page=participants-database-edit_participant&id=[sampleid]

    There might be other useful tokens as well.

    3. Allow pasting of code into Rich Text Editor Fields (BUG?)

    This might be a bug, but any rich text editor field would not accept pasted text from the clipboard neither HTML nor regular text. We had to switch to the “Text”-View version, but then of course HTML links and formatting would disappear. Would be great if this could be fixed. (we were using Chromium on Win 7).

    4. Mass editing mode

    It would be useful to have some kind of mass-editing mode. This would allow for example to update a single field for all database entries quickly. This could be part for example of the “List Participants” menu: Select samples, choose mass-edit mode, select field(s) to edit and then it shows an editable table for all samples.

    5. Have you thought about introducing computational fields?

    A computational field would allow you to perform a computation on any of the entry fields and output the result. For example, let’s say you have a persons height in imperial units such as 6’3″, with a computational field you could automate the output in metric units, and the field would show 190 cm. Drupal has such a functionality, where you can pretty much use any php-code to perform the calculation or generate output. I understand that this is not trivial to implement.

    I hope this feedback is useful. Thanks again for your great plugin,

    Erik

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  • Plugin Author xnau webdesign

    (@xnau)

    Thanks, Erik, I really appreciate your thoughtful feedback. The direction this plugin has evolved in over the years has been mostly in response to what Participants Database users have said they wanted to do with the plugin.

    These are good ideas, and given more time to work on the plugin they would be in there!

    This may be coming a little late for you, but a good way to set up lots of records in Participants Database is to use a spreadsheet app to prepare all the records and then import them. It does require a pretty good understanding of how the process works, but it is efficient. Your suggestions would be more generally accessible to users unfamiliar with using spreadsheets, definitely a better UI.

    #2: this introduces some possibilities I hadn’t considered, so thanks for the suggestion.

    #3: pasting HTML or any text into a rich-text editor does work (tested it just now), but it’s often very messy with HTML because it is taken out of context. That it doesn’t work at all is not a bug I’ve heard about before, and I would love to lear more about that. The plugin isn’t responsible for the rich text editor, that is all WordPress core code, but if the plugin is mishandling that somehow, I’d like to fix it.

    #5 I have considered this feature many times and have yet to come up with a satisfying user interface for implementing it. Dynamic fields like this are possible using API filters or custom templates, but that is only available to people who know a little PHP. I should write a tutorial on how to accomplish things like this.

    thanks again, Roland

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)
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