Hi,
so going back to the user interface, in a previous thread we said that
there is a number of combo boxes and two pane selectors in the
UI that would just break badly when working against a very large catalog.
Think for example about the style dropdown, trying to choose from
100000 different styles (good luck with that…), it would be unmanageable
from a size p.o.v. (too large HTML) but also for the admin to find
anything in it.
For the combo boxes, I was thinking that we could have something like
the SRS editor, that is, text input plus a button following it, to open
a dialog that can act as a search GUI (less intimidating than
a empty text box):
The text box would be auto-complete style, and would return
anything that contains the typed text, the find would open a
dialog like the layer panel one, but paged, and with the ability to
filter using the usual search box:
Now… should we have this as the default UI? Personally I find the auto-complete
interesting, because I find sometimes I know more or less then name of what I’m
looking for (“it had red inside the word”) but might struggle finding it in a dropdown
with 100 or so elements.
An alternative would be that we put a size limit, and we have a component that
switches between combo and the above representation (e.g., switch when there
are more than 100 items, or 1000 items).
For the side by side panel case (think alternative styles in the layer editor) we have
a similar issue, and I guess we could have something similar to the keyword editor,
but with the autocomplete text + find on top of it (instead of below), and an arrow to add
the new item to the list of selected items
Feedback please 
Cheers
Andrea
···
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Ing. Andrea Aime
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