In my opinion, keeping a product list in unison with a shopping cart is a common feature - I have personally built tons. However, the process is always far more complicated than it has to be, due to some technical limitations.
One of the main reasons is this: The shopping cart allows you to add/remove items by ID. But the Excel IA does NOT let you add/remove/update items by an ID. You can ONLY remove/update a cell or row by the ROW Number…which we all know…CHANGES depending on filtering. (Ex: if you filter out 15 of 30 rows, all of your index numbering is no longer sequential)
Why is it like this? Is this a limitation of Excel? If a collection can scroll to an item by it’s name, why can’t the IA remove an item by the value of an ID field that we create?
Let me be frank - I’ve been designing with Intuiface for many years, and I have documents of solutions that I reference. I’m not looking for work-around ideas here (unless you know a way to update/remove row by ID in Excel). I’m hoping some community members can spring some support for this…the Excel IA can probably do much more, which would save us all tons of time. I personally think the option to Update or Remove a record by ID is a great place to start. Heck, even if we have to tell the Excel which column has the ID’s, that’s fine.
I know Intuiface is working hard on the HCMS…but Excel is still a relevant, powerful tool. I gave a shopping cart example here, but added functionality in Excel will go far beyond a the shopping cart.
What does everyone think? Can we get behind this? Any other ideas of what to add to the Excel IA? Am I becoming old and grizzled?
YES, please add update/remove record by ID for Excel. And more.
I’d like to second @AlexB in his request, even if my use cases haven’t been strongly impacted yet by the lack of the add / remove record by ID in Excel.
To me Excel is such an important extension of Intuiface. Almost all XPs I build, use the Excel IA. I’m sure we have all learnt how to live with some of its limitations (e.g. performance), but investing some development time to refine it further, may save considerable time to designers, and / or enable new use cases…
The team does have an evolution for Excel behavior, although it is not scheduled yet.
The specs are also not entirely defined yet, but one of the ideas would be to add a Row property visible among the properties of the data coming from your Excel file, so you could bind the Row parameter of an Update Cell / Update Row / Delete Row action on that property.
Not sure yet if there will be only 1 Row property or 2: an Absolute Row and a “Filtered Row”, but the idea would be that whether you have a filter applied or not on your data feed, you could call an action on that row from within the data template (at least).
Good to hear there’s been some talk of updates. I think they would be very welcome. Of course, I personally feel the more power the asset has, the better!
If I understand correclty, I think that would get us part of the way there.
I think the Update / Delete would need two parts:
Identify the row the needs to be updated / deleted: The user would select the column and enter the bindable value. Checkbox to match case sensitivity.
Define what field to update: The user will then select the column to be updated, and enter the bindable value for the new replacement.
Under that, a general property: a drop down or radial select:
If multiple records found either: Update All or Update First to match.
Seb, for your mention of a Filtered Row, how would there be another property to ask the user if they want to update the cell WITH or WITHOUT current filters applied?
By the way, with a little time, I could probably make a list of other features that would be great to have in the excel IA. I’d be happy to be part of any discussions or take a look at what your ideas are. A delete all rows would also be nice to have, especially in cases with Excel is used for temp records like comparisons, or just to hold form data that persists through a reboot, and then can be deleted quickly.
Haha, my bad. Yes, disregard that last one - I have indeed used that in Excel. I think I was thinking of Knack, which does not have a delete all records function.
When I have some time, I’ll forward you a list of ideas. But I’m curious what’s already on your list so I don’t rework the wheel.
