[Emerald] idea for search capability

Brad Teague ( Teague@NetworksPlus.com )
Thu, 29 Apr 1999 18:02:57 -0500

Dale and Gang:
I've been thinking about how emerald searches for acconts and have noticed
several times that it seems to be a bit limited.
I was thinking of a way to make it a bit more robust and determined that if
you were to have a tab for "Power Searching" that would go directly to the
table level it could make finding stuff sometimes easier and way more
powerful.

For Instance, I thought of something very simple that would allow for at
least more extensive searching and it would be very easy for users.

If you were to have two drop down boxes in a row. The first one would be a
drop-down list of the fields in the table. Then, once you pick a value from
that drop-down box, it loads all unique values in the table for that field
into the other drop-down box. Which then the user would pick the value they
wanted to search for... then hit enter, "Search", whatever..and the SQL
statement to find accounts would be derived off of what was in those boxes.
That would allow for very precise searching and if you were to combine two
or three lines of those and an and/or box between each line, it would make
for some really nice "power searching".

I just know that I am constantly having to fire up my "MS Query" tool (i'm
not extremely proficient with doing straight sql statements in ISQL_w yet :)
to try and find things that the Billing group asks for. I know that if there
were a tool like this, it would allow me to show them how to look the stuff
up theirselves and I wouldn't be bothered with it :)

I'd love to give more suggestions and even some diagrams of my ideas if your
actually interested. I am pleased with this program a great deal, I just
think some of the aesthetics could be worked on a bit to make it more user
friendly for a broader population of users.

Hope you'll think about it,
Brad

------------------------------
Brad Teague
Network Administrator
Networks Plus
teague@networksplus.com