UI change for editing groups and products

[Gregary Hendricks]

On Monday 19 September 2005 08:15, Joel Peshkin wrote:
> I am considering a change to the behvior of editproducts and editgroups
> and I would like some input before starting this.

YAY :-)

> For sites with etremely large lists of products and groups, the
> editproducts and editgroups initial selection pages are unmanagably
> long.  At the same time, for small sites, I think we want to take users
> directly to the full list of products/groups.

Ours definitely falls into this category. We are planning on working with 
classifications now that they are available in 2.20 which will, of course, 
break up our huge list of products.

> I think we have the following options....
> 1) If there are more than THRESHOLD (50?) items in the list, show the
> first 50 and a text box similar to the one in editusers to select a
> subset by regexp.

Maybe. However I think it would confuse users as soon as they hit their nth 
product to have the page suddenly change.

> 2) If there are more than THRESHOLD (50?) items in the list, show the
> first 50 and a set of hyperlinks to other groups of 50 (like mailman
> does...     So, we show from aacme to beowulf, and there is a link to
> "show from bugzilla to gcc")
>
> 3) Prompt for a regexp just like editusers does today.

This is a good idea regardless of the number of products listed.

> For any of these options, should THRESHOLD be a param?  A userpref?
>
> Any other suggestions?

Along these same lines it would be good to make the enter_bug page more user 
friendly as well. In our case we have a large group of users with different 
reasons for coming to bugzilla. Not all of them know what classification or 
even what product they should enter a bug against. It would be good if there 
were a regexp search box on bug entry. 

I am actually working on a way to clean up the enter bug page a little. I am 
toying with taking the classifications and products selection and putting 
them on a single page instead of having them on separate pages as they are 
now.

I envision a classifications dropdown list and a products dropdown list. The 
default selection in classifications would be ALL and the product list would 
contain all the products with <optgroup> tags much like it is on the specific 
search page. Selecting a classification would refactor the products list to 
only contain products of that classification. 

Selecting either a classification or product would refactor the page with the 
description off to one side of the dropdown. The refactoring could be 
javascript which would make it fast. For those with javascript disabled, a 
link that displays the page much as it currently exists would be good.

Thoughts?

Greg Hendricks 
Novell IS&T Engineer 
GHendricks at novell.com