Action Buttons in Lists Re-organized
Several pages in the system display a list of items where various actions can be taken on each item. For example, the timesheet page displays a list of activities and each activity can have several different actions applied such as edit, copy, or close. Previously these actions were listed as separate buttons on each line, but this led to a large table of buttons and did not scale well. In preparation for additional functions being deployed, this approach has been replaced with a drop down list of actions for each line.
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I don’t really like the drop down list. It would help if it would display the action you selected while waiting for the next screen.
Comment by Karlene Coyan — 5/4/2005 @ 3:03 pm
Thanks for your feedback! We discussed changing the series of buttons into a drop-down list for quite some time. We quickly came to the realization that adding more functions to the system would cause the page to become much too wide. So we’ve opted to go for a menu-like approach so that we can add more actions without changing the layout of the page. We’ll be rolling out one of those new actions soon… stay tuned!
Your point about the action list switching back to the first selection in the menu is a valid one. This was done so that if the action caused a new window to open, the action list would be automatically reset so that you could choose another action easily. However, as we discussed your comment it occurred to us that we only need to reset the action list if you are indeed causing a new window to appear (this is something we can detect). We can also make the action list reset itself a few seconds after the new window opens as well. With this change that we just rolled out, using the action lists should be a little easier.
Thanks again for your comments!
Comment by Jonny Roller — 5/5/2005 @ 5:53 am
Thank you for changing this so quickly.
Comment by Karlene Coyan — 5/11/2005 @ 4:09 pm