1.7.4 comments

[Linas Vepstas]

On Mon, Dec 02, 2002 at 03:40:44PM -0500, Derek Atkins was heard to remark:
> Jonathan Corbet <lwn-gnucash@lwn.net> writes:
> 
> >        But...why
> >   can't I *type* a customer name when creating an invoice? 
> 
> Because..  Well.. you just can't.  The real reason is that there is no
> way to intuit _what_ you want to search for when you type in a name.
> I don't want to use a pull-down menu, because I don't want to require
> the engine to cache all your customers in ram (imagine a SQL database
> with thousands of customers).
> 
> If you were to type something, should it search for the name? the id?
> the contact?  What if there are no matches?  multiple matches?
> 
> I didn't want to go down that route -- so I make you go through the
> search dialog.  If you prefer I can make it so you can't even enter

I used peachtree heavily for a while, and I remember that one of
thethings I didn't like about it was that most tasks required you to go
through the search dialog (and a huge pull-down of all accounts!),
which got tedious and annoying pretty quick.  

So how about this for a suggested enhancement: If the sql database has
less than e.g. 200 names, then  all the names *would* be cached in ram,
and the usual type-ahead/matching/tab-completion would work.  Otherwise,
if the list seems too big, then the search dialog is forced...  (yes, I
know, don't remind me that I, too, can volunteer to code this up ...)

--linas

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