GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 101456
'Find' dialog cumbersome for Business functions
Last modified: 2018-06-29 20:23:22 UTC
We have a small business with no more than a dozen customers. When I want to create a new invoice for a customer, it would be *much* easier to simply select the customer name from a drop-down box than to search for matching customer names using the 'Find' dialog. So it would be quite advantageous to small business users if there was a preference which allowed the choice between a drop-down list or the Find dialog. Similarly, when searching for an invoice, it would be very useful to have a drop down list of invoices with amounts outstanding. For a small business with few outstanding invoices, this would make for much quicker access than going through the Find dialog. Alternatives to providing such a preference would be to have the Find dialog itself incorporated a drop-down list of valid items or else allow it to do a search with an empty search criterion and have that return all available entries. Basically, it should be possible to select customers, invoices, vendors, bills, etc, using just the mouse, but currently you are forced to enter data on the keyboard at some point.
*** Bug 96054 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 153098 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Note to self (or to someone who might want to implement this feature).. This could probably be implemented now using a GtkCompletion off a GtkCombo
I have the same basic request as the original poster. I notice that this has been open for 4 and a bit years now - obviously there can't be that much interest in it, but personally I found this (and still find it) one of the most annoying features of GnuCash.
Could not find a way to vote for this bug so I just declare that I completely agree with original submitter.
There's no voting here. If you want to vote, the best way is to actually do something about it. Patches are always welcome. :)
I agree that the find dialog for vendors and customers is cumbersome to use. Unfortunatly, I also lack the time and programming experience to improve this feature. I have been thinking of another solution that tackles this issue slightly differently: * make the text field editable and treat it as a search string * let the user enter a part of the Vendor's or Customer's name in this text field. * when the focus moves to another field or button, use the entered text to perform a search on vendor/customer, but without showing the find window. * if this search returns only one vendor/customer -> use that one (update the text field to reflect this) * if the find action returns multiple results, open the find dialog with the search already executed, so it shows all the possible results for the search string. That way it's easy to select the correct vendor/customer from the find window without having to retype the search string. This system already avoids a lot of mouse-clicks. Especially for myself, I tend to type search strings that are unique. And even if I can't use a unique search string easily, it would help me a lot if the find window popped up AFTER I entered my search string. It's just an idea. I don't know at all if this would be easier to implement or rather more complicated.
Geert, What you just described is almost exactly what a GtkCompletion in a GtkCombo would do.
Oh... Sorry for being so ignorant. =-)
*** Bug 455805 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
From bug 455805 Add menu item for listing all customers/vendors/Jobs etc I looked at the menu creation structure and can easily add the menu item but at the moment dont have all the information/knowledge to create a menu action & onscreen list Can anyone help point me to information on this ?? Derek can you point me to where the balance of the menu/action info is ??
As another small business owner using Gnucash, I'd just like to add my voice to the choir and say that this really should be implemented in some form. Combo boxes would be nice, but a quick fix that should be fairly trivial to implement would just be to automatically search with an empty key (= all results), so at least a subset of the results would be immediately selectable.
Would be nice to see this fixed. In the mean time, if you want to see all results, put a full stop character (.) in the search box and change the drop down from 'contains' to 'matches regex'. This will show all the entries.
Agreed with Comment #12 - just allowing no search criteria would make working around this a lot simpler and shouldn't be difficult to code. Downloading the source now :-)
Created attachment 97803 [details] [review] patch to allow empty list of search criterion in search dialogs Yay, ten minutes of hacking in between things and waiting for it to build and I have a working patch. This enables removing all search criteria, in which case all results will be returned. It should work from any standard GnuCash search dialog. This is my first GnuCash patch so let me know any problems. It's really small - at first I just decreased the minimum number of criteria to 0, but it crashed when trying to check if the last criterion was valid, so I disabled that check if there are no criteria and hey presto it appears to work. With keyboard shortcuts its really fast to search - you just enter Alt-R Alt-F to remove the default criterion and search as soon as the dialog opens. (Hold down Alt and press RF). Patch attached against GnuCash 2.2.1, tested on Fedora on the busines dialogs - Customers, Invoices, Bills, etc
Created attachment 97818 [details] [review] patch to allow empty list of search criterion, or empty search string in search dialogs Added an updated version of the patch. This simply removes the check to ensure that the search string is not empty, if the search type is "contains". As you would logically expect, all strings contain the empty string. So now you can simply click "Find" (or press Alt-F) from the default search criteria (usually contains with an empty string on some field) and all records will be returned.
OK I've been running the patch and it seems to work really nicely for me. Is one of the developers available to look at it or should I enquire elsewhere? If anyone wants to test and it would help I can supply patched rpms for Fedora Core 7 (or a Fedora source rpm you might be able to rebuild) - but the patch is very simple so if you can build gnucash it should be easy to use.
While I agree this is a good patch, in that a blank search string should just return everything, and its what I expect, it doesn't really address this issue properly, IMO. If you read back to Derek's comments on GtkCompletion w/ GtkCombo, that would allow you to search the list of vendors/customers *in place* in the New Invoice dialog, instead of navigating to a new window just to find the vendor/customer. That is the *proper* solution to this. Your patch, however, is good, IMO, and should be included, but not as a means of fulfilling this enhancement.
Aha, re-reading it I see that is indeed the case... and agreed would make life even better... if I get a chance I might try make a patch for it It would also be nice to have the possibility of browsing through vendors, invoices etc, from a tab in the main application rather than just through find dialogs - perhaps an equivalent to the accounts hierarchy with business items in it, or perhaps part of that hierarchy, but that should really go in another bug if there isn't one already...
I've wanted to work on this as well, and basically understand the problem, but haven't had the time to dive into it. If I get into it at all, I'll post on -devel and maybe we can collaborate a bit. And yes, a nicer interface into the business features would be nice, but that is another issue.
Yay, another release - but missing my patch :-( As comment #18 said above, this isn't a full solution but it would be nice to get included - any hints on the best approach to getting this in? :-)
Transferred my patch to bug 115066 as that seems more relevant
*** Bug 533894 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
(In reply to comment #16) > Created an attachment (id=97818) [edit] > patch to allow empty list of search criterion, or empty search string in search > dialogs Andi updated this patch as attachment 104815 [details] [review] of bug 115066 This cumbersome entry of invoices is the main reason I have dropped the ball on giving Derek's business functions in Gnucash a a serious chance last time I tried them. Looking forward to the inclusion of this patch as a stop-gap measure until somebody finds the time to turn their attention to GtkCompletion as mentioned in comment 8.
*** Bug 551376 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
The patch from here is being discussed in bug 115066, hence it is obsolete here. And comment #18 is still valid: GtkCompletion w/ GtkCombo is probably the method of choice to solve the original request.
Created attachment 142911 [details] [review] GtkEntryCompletion implementation for business functions This patch implements the GtkEntryCompletion in the business search dialogs. It allows to select a vendor/customer/job/... directly from the text entry fields, bypassing the Search dialog. Comments are welcome.
Created attachment 142914 [details] [review] Updated patch to implement GtkEntryCompletion in business functions This update to my patch ensures that the text entry field is only editable where it makes sense: when selecting a Vendor/Customer/Invoice/... In the invoice ledger, the entry fields are not editable. It doesn't make sense there to change a vendor/job/customer. You can still click the Edit button in this case to edit the vendor/job/customer itself.
Created attachment 142938 [details] [review] Patch to implement GktEntryCompletion in business functions This third revision limits the list of autocompletion values to Active objects only.
Comment on attachment 142938 [details] [review] Patch to implement GktEntryCompletion in business functions Looks good to me.
Comment on attachment 142938 [details] [review] Patch to implement GktEntryCompletion in business functions r18349
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