DIGG IT! There is a very useful UI pattern emerging for RIA applications in terms of filtering results. Basically as a user enters data and results are filtered in real time. I have seen many cases of this recently in several applications and thought highlighting a few would be useful.
Slider Based Filtering:
HomeLocator by ASFusion
Flex Store(view Products)
Text Input Filtering:
YouTube.com Live Search by Kirk Ballou
FlexJax Search (php/mysql) $$
Search Grid Component by Uday M. Shankar
Apollo Tunes by Mike Chambers
What I find interesting about these examples is that filtering simplifies the amount of visible data. Filtering removes irrelevant data from view and allows the end user to focus and work within the remaining data. The slider model allows you to set high and low bounds on the viewed dataset and the text input provides search results. It will be interesting to see changes to this pattern as we see many Flex applications appear publicly.
More to come!
Next post is "Custom Pre-loaders for Flex 2"!
Ted :)
I have done this in Prototype (which has the handy formobserver class), and am poking around with tying to to Spry master/detail regions, now that Spry is compatible with Prototype:
http://www.pasa-online.org/volunteers/p1.cfm
Hi Ted,
We found that this filter data process was a big help even in Flash.
Especially with managing complex data transactions with the server it was easier to take a snapshot of an area of the model and push it to the server for evaluation.
By filtering the data straight to the model using component's change handler you knew that the model already had the most up-to-date values.
I have been contemplating how this process can be enhanced with FDS. Perhaps we can remove the client side model and communicate straight from the component event to the back-end. Maybe we can avoid having to translate server data to a client side model.
Is there a way of easily setting up dataBinding between a ui component and a server Value Object?
Regards,
Bjorn
Hi Ted,
In this post, you had quoted my component and that was very much inspiring and encouraging.
I have updated the searchgrid with a few bells and whistles. :) . its available at http://flexed.wordpress.com/2006/12/26/customgrid-v10-or-searchgrid-v20/ and the demo is @ http://udayms.com/flex/cgrid/UseCustomGrid.html
Cheers.