Developer Vs End Users
There is one thing about programming that always ends up biting me in the butt. How the end users perception of something invariably ends up being different from the perception held by the person who developed something.
Tony texted me today saying he couldn't add inventory into his application. I hadn't touched that particular screens in months so I assumed there may have been a bug. So I fire up the application, go to the one little screen I added to make it possible to manually adjust inventory and everything works.
So I turn off the laptop, nurse my bleeding lip a bit (I had cut myself a while earlier) and think for a bit. Then a thought occurs to me. I open it back up, make one more attempt, and sure enough I know exactly what the problem is.
The technical description. I have a combo box. If you type part of what you are searching and hit enter it will populate with what looks like a list of part numbers. In actuality it is a list of products and I have told the combo box to display the part number. To my mind, I'm always paranoid I typed things incorrectly, so I always like to validate my input, choosing the item from a list I know there is no typo. Tony goes into the same screen and types in the full part number without ever pressing enter. As a result, there are no products in the collection for the combo box, so when he finishes and thinks he has input everything he gets an exception telling him he hasn't put in a value for every field.
Anyway, I went ahead and changed it so that the combo box would populate as he typed and then also checked on submit if there is text but no selection to try and find one that matches first. That way, even if he didn't hit enter if he typed the full part number in it will still work. I think I'm making things easier by allowing him a way so that he doesn't have to type in the full part number... and inadvertently made the system that little bit more complex.
Tony texted me today saying he couldn't add inventory into his application. I hadn't touched that particular screens in months so I assumed there may have been a bug. So I fire up the application, go to the one little screen I added to make it possible to manually adjust inventory and everything works.
So I turn off the laptop, nurse my bleeding lip a bit (I had cut myself a while earlier) and think for a bit. Then a thought occurs to me. I open it back up, make one more attempt, and sure enough I know exactly what the problem is.
The technical description. I have a combo box. If you type part of what you are searching and hit enter it will populate with what looks like a list of part numbers. In actuality it is a list of products and I have told the combo box to display the part number. To my mind, I'm always paranoid I typed things incorrectly, so I always like to validate my input, choosing the item from a list I know there is no typo. Tony goes into the same screen and types in the full part number without ever pressing enter. As a result, there are no products in the collection for the combo box, so when he finishes and thinks he has input everything he gets an exception telling him he hasn't put in a value for every field.
Anyway, I went ahead and changed it so that the combo box would populate as he typed and then also checked on submit if there is text but no selection to try and find one that matches first. That way, even if he didn't hit enter if he typed the full part number in it will still work. I think I'm making things easier by allowing him a way so that he doesn't have to type in the full part number... and inadvertently made the system that little bit more complex.
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