The Record Selector can be opened via the following workflows.
Record Selector cells and inputs have a large amount of behavior in common, but they’re not identical.
In both cases, the component needs to allow the following actions:
NULL
).<a>
element so that users may copy the link or open it in a new tab. (While this is a strict requirement for cells, it may be okay to forgo navigation from inputs entirely.)Additionally for cells, the component needs to allow:
Cells and inputs can be empty (NULL
) or full. And they can be focused (selected in the case of cells), or unfocused. These characteristics lead to eight distinct states, each of which has a design specified below.
Via keyboard when focused
Enter
opens the record selector.Delete
clears any value set.Via pointer on the non-icon area
Interaction | Operation |
---|---|
Click | Focus |
Double click | Launch Record Selector |
Context menu |
|
Via pointer on an icon
<a>
element. Single clicks navigate to the Record Page in the current browser tab. Context menu or middle click can be used to open in the Record Page in a new tab – even within the cell, where thee non-icon area opens a custom context menu.<button>
elements which trigger via a single (or double) click. A context menu event on these buttons will behave as it does in the non-icon area.The custom context menu for cells contains the following entries:
{table_name}
Record{record_summary}
Navigation via icon instead of text
Preliminary designs for this feature had cell which looked more like this:
The idea was that you’d click on the record summary to navigate to the Record Page. The problem with this design is that users may want to open the Record Page in a new tab, but for other functionality we are providing a custom context menu on cells, making that difficult. Using an icon for navigation allows the user to open the browser’s context menu on the navigation link and then open the link in a new tab or to copy the link to the clipboard. The user can still open the custom context menu via the non-icon area within the cell, allowing them to set the value to NULL
, just as they would for any other type of column.
Double click mistakes
Here’s a problem I’d like to avoid. Consider the following UX design from AirTable
The x
button within the record summary (which clears the value) only displays when the cell is selected. That’s nice aesthetically, but it can lead to the user unintentionally clearing the value by double clicking the cell in the area where the x
button will appear after the first click.
Our design has a similar problem, but the result will be unintentional navigation instead of unintentional deletion. I think that might be tolerable. But if it’s not, we could add a small delay for displaying the “open record” icon link.
Here’s a “Publications” record selector, as it looks immediately after opening:
Enter
opens the record selector for it. Note: This behavior is consistent with Google Tables, but different from AirTable. For a cell with existing values, AirTable does not open the record selector on Enter
, presumably to prevent the user from accidentally overwriting values. I prefer the consistency of Google’s behavior here.Tab
and Shift+Tab
moves focus between the search inputs.<select>
element.Up
and Down
keys move the selection.Esc
key closes the record selector without producing a record.Enter
closes the record selector, producing the record associated with the currently select option.The search uses some fuzzy logic when finding and sorting records. Here’s how it works:
Begin with our shared sample data (transformed to the final schema).
Add some more data:
insert into "Authors" ("First Name", "Last Name") values
('Brianna', 'Murphy'),
('Annabelle', 'Smith'),
('Joanna', 'Stevenson'),
('Adrian', 'Richardson'),
('Anna', 'Richardson'),
('Anna', 'Wilson-Rich'),
('Joanna', 'Rich'),
('Hans', 'Ulrich');
We are looking for an author named “Anna Rich”. Let’s search the “Authors” table by entering “Anna” into “First Name” and “Rich” into “Last Name”.
This produces the following results (with the points
column displayed here for reference).
Id | First Name | Last Name | Website | points |
---|---|---|---|---|
Anna | Rich | |||
276 | Anna | Richardson | 7 | |
277 | Anna | Wilson-Rich | 6 | |
278 | Joanna | Rich | 6 | |
137 | Barbara | Rich | 4 | |
80 | Anna | Humphrey | http://annahumphrey.com | 4 |
6 | Anne | Richards | http://richards.biz | 3 |
39 | Michael | Richards | 3 | |
71 | James | Richard | https://richard.com | 3 |
272 | Annabelle | Smith | 3 | |
274 | Adrian | Richardson | 3 |
We don’t get any exact matches, but the records that match most closely are listed first.
The query is run as follows:
WITH anon_cte AS (
SELECT *,
CASE WHEN "First Name" ILIKE 'Anna' THEN 4
WHEN "First Name" ILIKE 'Anna%' THEN 3
WHEN "First Name" ILIKE '%Anna%' THEN 2
ELSE 0
END
+
CASE WHEN "Last Name" ILIKE 'Rich' THEN 4
WHEN "Last Name" ILIKE 'Rich%' THEN 3
WHEN "Last Name" ILIKE '%Rich%' THEN 2
ELSE 0
END
AS points
FROM "Authors"
)
SELECT * FROM anon_cte
WHERE points > 0
ORDER BY points DESC
LIMIT 10;
The case statements should probably be wrapped into some db-layer function like search_score(text, text) -> int
, and overloading that would enable scoring other types.
When at least one column contains a query, a “ghost row” will appear above the result set, allowing the user to select a record that will be created on-the-fly using all of the data from their search. The ghost row is filled in as the user types.
The user can highlight the ghost row by pressing Up
– and in this state, validation errors will be displayed for cells as needed using the same UX as when adding a new row to a table.
To create a new Publications record, the user needs to supply an Authors record. They use a “nested” record selector to locate or create one Authors record as follows:
Note: There are some layout details here that will need to be worked out during implementation, such as horizontal scrolling.
The nested record selector opens when its target cell is selected (there’s not need to press Enter
), and it closes when a different higher-level cell is selected. There’s no way for it to be closed while its target cell is selected.
Note: UX gets a bit weird with tables that only contain FK columns. In the worst case scenario, a table would have only two columns, both of which are FKs. Selecting a record would be impossible because there would be no way to close the nested selectors. In the slightly-better-but-still-bad case, a table contains a PK plus two FKs. Here, you’d need to select the PK cell to hid the nested selectors. These cases are rare enough that I think it’s fine to discount them for now. With some more thought and experimentation, we can detect cases like that adjust the UI behavior a bit to better suit them.
After selecting an Authors record, the top-level Publications record selector will become active again, with a value for “Author Id” filled in, and with a string representation of that Authors record displayed in its place.
Use case…
With a little more UX work, I think it would be possible to incorporate an “update” functionality into the record selector.
Use case…
I’ve acquired a new copy of Moneyball by Michael Lewis, and I’d like to enter it as an item.
Within the item, I begin to locate or create a “Publications” record. My search looks as follows:
Id | ISBN | Title | Year | Author Id | Publisher Id |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Moneyball | |||||
91821 | 0393324818 | Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game | 2004 | Michael Lewis |
W. W. Norton Company |
… | … | … | … | … | … |
The first result appears to be a match at first, but then I notice that the book I’m holding is the 2011 edition, with ISBN 0393338398. Upon entering those details I see there is no matching record in the database, so I set out to add one by filling in all the fields I can.
I need to associate my new Publications record, with an Authors record. Here’s what my Authors search looks like:
Id | First Name | Last Name | Website |
---|---|---|---|
Michael | Lewis | ||
8276 | Michael | Lewis | NULL |
13901 | Michael | Lewis | NULL |
… | … | … | … |
Hmmm. There are two Michael Lewis records! Which do I chose? Are they duplicates? I real life, there are actually as many as twenty published authors named Michael Lewis! While picking an Authors record, I want to see a list of books associated with each author.
This is tricky though. The Michael Lewis I’m after has published a lot of books! How will that list of books be sorted? What text will display for each book? (Because the full title of Moneyball is actually quite long.) Can I filter the list? Can I select an author named Michael Lewis who has published at least one book whose title begins with Moneyball??? Designing a UX which helps answer that sort of question (without lots of clicks and keystrokes) is an interesting challenge!
We could also construct a more common use case if we venture outside our example schema. Consider a CRM-like schema with person
records which each have many email_address
records. When entering an activity
record, I want to select a person
that has at least one email_address
which contains a field that matches a query. And in this case I also want to add a new person with that email address if I don’t find a matching person. Adding is especially tough because we can’t create the email_address
record until we create the peron
record, so the “drill-down-and-back-up-again” UX outlined in the specs above won’t work for the email_address
.
These scenarios are more tricky to handle and will require more UX thought. But for some schemata handling them well will be pretty important.