Filtering of rows during selection

Rails
1

Hi all,
I am new to rails, and for that matter programming for the web.
Scenario:
In a Purchase Order screen, I am trying to let a user (Fred) select a
customer(General Hospital-MA) and some products.
Typically, it can be done using a dropdown list to select from the
customers (and products).

Our case:
We have hundreds of customers, and thousands of products, so the
dropdownlist is just not suitable.

What is was:
In the olden days(I guess I belong there?), there would be a popup
that shows CustomerCode and CustomerName and there would be 2 text
fields above for the user to put in a few characters (with wildcard).
Upon typing “hosp” (or “%hosp%” or “hosp”) and pressing “find”, the
selection list would filter the data and show only those filtered
records. User then chooses 1 from the much shorter list and it
returns to the previous window, populating the other fields.

Question:
How do I do the equivalent of this in Rails?
It doesn’t have to be a popup or have a text field for filtering data
or any of the traditional UI practices.
It just has to give the user an easy way to select 1 from 1,000
records very quickly.

Thanks.

2

Jesterz wrote:

Hi all,
I am new to rails, and for that matter programming for the web.
Scenario:
In a Purchase Order screen, I am trying to let a user (Fred) select a
customer(General Hospital-MA) and some products.
Typically, it can be done using a dropdown list to select from the
customers (and products).

Our case:
We have hundreds of customers, and thousands of products, so the
dropdownlist is just not suitable.

What is was:
In the olden days(I guess I belong there?), there would be a popup
that shows CustomerCode and CustomerName and there would be 2 text
fields above for the user to put in a few characters (with wildcard).
Upon typing “hosp” (or “%hosp%” or “hosp”) and pressing “find”, the
selection list would filter the data and show only those filtered
records. User then chooses 1 from the much shorter list and it
returns to the previous window, populating the other fields.

Question:
How do I do the equivalent of this in Rails?
It doesn’t have to be a popup or have a text field for filtering data
or any of the traditional UI practices.
It just has to give the user an easy way to select 1 from 1,000
records very quickly.

Thanks.

Sounds like a simple database query, and you can tack on the ‘%’
yourself to make it a bit more inclusive…
You can also take a look at this:
http://javathehutt.blogspot.com/2009_06_01_archive.html
Absolutely awesome rails plugin for sortable tables, and it has a search
box.

3

Hi Aldric,
Thanks for the tip.
Could you also help guide me on how to make something like this
sortable_table work as a selection box that returns a selected
customer to the Purchase Order screen?

The scenario is that the user is in a Purchase Order screen, creating
a purchase order and is going to select a customer (out of 1000) and
after selecting, will continue entering the other data related to the
purchase order.

Thanks.