Future development - wish list

[developmentwork]

This component is extremely useful for displaying massive amounts of data that otherwise would not fit on a page or that would be difficult to manage in Joomla.

If you have a lot of data in Excel files (CSV) and you want to use it in Joomla, than this extension is something you really need to look into. It is ideal for large repositories.
The extension is robust and easy to use.

Based on a similar application (http://dec.usaid.gov) we formulated the following wish list:

1) Once you open a record in detailed view, you cannot move to the next record with a button (such as a next or previous record button) or enter a record number to jump through the list. You need to go back to the previous page with your “go back one page” button in the browser and click on a new entry in the list. It would be very useful if users were able to scroll through records while they are in detailed view.

2) Better documentation on linked tables.

3) Another great option would be to link to files in a field directly from a directory on the server.

4) Option to manually add additional fields (now you can only upload the CSV with a predetermined number of fields).

5) The option to enable, disable the search function and set the default number of rows to be displayed.

6) If you search a table on a key word, the list shows only entries with the keyword which is correct. The problem is that when you go to another table, the entry in the search box is also used to display the contents of new table. So, if you are out of luck, no entries will be show in the new table. The search box should be empty each time you click on a new table.

That all said, it is a wonderful and functional addition to Joomla, an extension with a great future.

Highly recommended.

Cheers,

www.test.developmentwork.net

[craig]

Hi & thanks for your positive comments!

1. On our list of future features
2. We have a new article and a FAQ entry that may help.
3. If I'm understanding you correctly, you can do that now by using a relative URL field ie. "/stories/pdf/manuals/widgetmanual.pdf" not a fully qualified URL like "http://www.somewhere.com".
The problem is that it's not a very pretty display and some server configs well...
4. On the list
5. On the list
6. On the list

Again thanks.

[romias]

Hey, I want to congratulate you for this component... it is a nice alternative to show tabular data.

I'm using the last update (#8) and it is very useful the option to disable serch for certain tables.

ABOUT SEARCH:
1) it could be nice if you can specify by which field you want to searh instead of for all the table. Obviously, it could be optional whether to serach by field or in all table.

2) Another useful feature would be adding a line of button with letters to filter the table by first letter in certain field. This could make your product a competitor for directory ones. It should be optional too.

ABOUT CSS STYLING:
So far, the styling is by column. It could be useful if during the generation of the HTML table, you set a class for even and odd rows


ABOUT LINKING TABLES:
1) Linking several tables by the same id. This way you could have an "index" table with the main records, with links to the associated tables. For example: in my case I list horses, and could be nice to have a linked table for "Horse's races" and other for "Horse's offpring" and so on.

I'm using your component as it is now, but this features will make it so flexible that you can address much more problems and make EasyTables useful for other fields than today people need to develope specific logic to save it to the DB.

Again: Great product!!

EDIT: I'm adding this also in the correct thread about future features.

[siddha05]

Great component!

Is it possible to not display any table data unless a search criteria matches with the record in the csv file. The idea is not to show all the data to everybody! Is that possible with the current version or is this going to be in the wish list of things?

Thanks.

Sid

[support]

Hi Sid,
In EasyTable Pro you can have a published table that isn't linked to by a menu item - but if you have set it to be searchable by the built-in Joomla search then records in it can be found. As shown in the screen shot below. Using the built-in search only the records that match the search criteria are returned.

EasyTable Pro Search Results

EasyTable-Pro-Searching-Non-Linked-Table.png (193.38 KiB) Viewed 160 times

It may be a 1.1 feature to make it more user friendly and direct - I'll have to figure it out though.

[fred_76]

It should be very convenient to be able to insert an EasyTable into an article and not only from a Menu item.

Otherwise, the module is very nice.

A+

http://www.fredmi.fr

[craig]

Hi fred_76,
there will be an plugin to allow tables to be inserted into articles but it won't be before the EasyTable Pro 1.0 version. At the same time there will also be a module to allow you to include it in a module position.

Cheers