Customer vs Company

Derek Atkins warlord at MIT.EDU
Wed Apr 2 00:09:08 CST 2003


Retracile <retracile at earthlink.net> writes:

> I think it is a simple task that needs a _simple_ way to do it.  I use regex's 
> daily, but my wife hasn't seen one.  It's one more thing I'd have to teach 
> her, or get her to memorize.

Why is it a task that needs to be performed?  I still don't understand
WHY you need such a list at all frequently.  What information are you
trying to find?

> I know it doesn't scale.  On the other hand, I have this printout of my 
> customers that I need to enter into GnuCash.  I'd like to have a list to 
> compare against my paper list.  And for that matter, a way to make another 
> paper list of customers.
> It may sound like a hack, but having a dialog pop up that says "You have more 
> than 200 customers.  Generating a list of all of them will take a lot of 
> time.  Are you sure?" and then have a progress dialog "Generating a complete 
> list of customers..." with a [Cancel] button come up if they say [Yes], would 
> provide the functionality to those who would use it (since they don't have 
> many customers) while warning the user they're about to do something 
> computationally expensive.
> (Generating a list in preparation for a mail-merge might be another 
> possibility, though that might be more of an 'export customer list as CSV' 
> function.)
> Alternatively, display them 50 at a time.
> Even so, I doubt you'd like it. :)  I may try doing something like that 
> though.

I still don't see why you need such a list...  What information are
you trying to glom from this list.  Searching for the existence of a
customer seems rather.... silly.  You must be looking for some particular
type of information in this list.

> Silly?  Well, I was looking for a "Report of my customers".  There _aren't_ 
> other reports that would do that, and, well, I expected there to be one, and 
> that was the closest match I found.  "Who are your customers?" is a 
> reasonable question to ask of a business.

Really?  I know who all my customers are.  I don't find a "who are your
customers" to be at all interesting.  "How much do my customers owe
me?"  Now THAT is an interesting questions, and you can get that through
the A/R Aging Report.  But just a list of my customers???  I still think
that's just silly.

> > As for "No Valid Company Selected" -- that's a good idea.  The major
> > issue is that the same code is used for Customers, Vendors, and
> > Employees so we would need a BUNCH of extra strings in there.  But I
> > do like your suggestion -- I'll just but a case statement in there and
> > use a bunch of strings like that.
> 
> Yay! :) Do you want an RFE filed for that?

Nope, already committed a fix.  It's probably still not quite to your
liking..  I did make the string "No Valid <type> Selected. ..."
where the "..." explains to click on options.

> Umm... I think I must not have presented that statement very well.  Having a 
> shortcut is a reasonable thing to want, and not something I want to remove.  
> I was looking at it from the perspective that if the shortcut functionality 
> was provided through auto-completion, we could then reduce the number of 
> fields confronting the user without loss of functionality.
> *shrug* It's a minor point, and one obviously subject to debate, so I'll 
> pursue the other issues instead.

Heh.

We had talked about trying to use autocompletion; there isn't a good
widget for it, yet.  Hopefully Gnome2 will help, but I suspect we'll
still have to implement our own auto-completing combo-box....  Then I
can try to work on using autocompletion for selecting a customer,
vendor, invoice, etc.

I understand the want for simplicity.  I'm certainly of the opionion
that we need to make everything as simple as possible... but no simpler!
It's that latter part that can be difficult; sometimes you need something
even though many people don't need it (because others do).  OTOH, making
the UI configurable per-user adds complexity....

> Keep up the good work!

Thanks!

> Eli

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available


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