Lately we have been doing a lot of internal development to help improve our internal processes. One of the joys of working internally is you get to think outside the square and do things that you never have done before, things that might not be safe.
A current dilemma that I have is making a system work the best for a bunch of different users who all have different needs for a screen. Users are upper management through to low end information gatherers.
For the management users, features are needed to move dates and objects and view the lists. They need specific onchange select lists for scanning and moving tasks. However adding those select lists has made the list much larger in height due to table rows needing to fit the selects in the space. So you can't see as much on screen.
Enter AJAX and JQuery. Hide the list until needed, click on the area and the select list appears. Awesome. However now we have two clicks in place of one.
I went searching. But what do you search for really? A idea was floating about making it so when the list appears it is automatically opened to show all the options. Sounds easy enough, right? But what on earth do you type into your search engine? "select list open" "select events" "select javascript reveal". 2 frustrated hours later, nothing really had come to light.
Well apparently this cannot be done using actual valid techniques and codes. It isn't impossible, but would take a lot of time and effort. You can do things like have a hidden CSS layer that mimics the drop down in space and options and when hovered automatically sets the option in the select. Seems a bit much for something we want done quick and dirty to improve processes.
The solution looks like it might be a show all option that just shows the drop down for the daily major movement of tasks, but when scanning the list to check over it – we could allow for the two clicks. Sometimes you just have to compromise, even when there seems like there should possibly be an easier solution.
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