weird table field behavior

[Richard Gaskin]

Bob Sneidar wrote:
> Yes. Don't use table fields. They are not real tables, but only a way  
> to get a text field to kind of act like it wants to be a table when it  
> grows up.
> 
> There are some quite usable solutions people have developed using  
> scripts to get a series of fields to look and act like a real table,  
> but the issue is always going to be large data sets. If it's just a  
> few columns of a few hundred rows of data you are probably going to be  
> fine. If it's 50 columns of 35,000 rows yer gonna weep.

If you attempt to make a table by using a separate field for each cell, 
yes, it'll be bloated and slow.

But using the existing list field object as a table works very well for 
database display (which is a profoundly different animal from a 
spreadsheet grid, for reasons we can get into later).

For DB work the only real limitation with using fields is that we don't 
currently have independent column alignment, so everything is 
left-aligned.  This makes some numeric displays a bit awkward, true, but 
not necessarily prohibitive for a great many applications.

As for performance, the field object holds up quite well.  Load times 
can be a drag for data > 50 MBs, but damn that's a lot of records.

I regularly display 50,000 records with a couple dozen fields in a test 
data set I use here - no performance issues at all.  In fact, the 
buffering is so good with Rev fields that the scrolling experience is 
noticeably nicer than with Excel or Word for equivalent-sized data.


> One of the huge (IMHO) feature requests for Revolution is a real table  
> object that acts like a basic spreadsheet or database table. For some  
> reason this has been set aside as not very important. But I would pay  
> good money for a Revolution update that had real table objects  
> complete with scripting commands for manipulating rows and columns of  
> data. I am not asking for a built in spreadsheet. I just want to be  
> able to tab between cells, select rows and columns, and detect when  
> and where in the table cells someone has clicked.

It's my understanding that it's actually a very high priority, but is 
taking some time to implement in a multi-platform way.

Perhaps Kevin could chime in here with a status update on that...

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Media Corporation
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  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com       http://www.FourthWorld.com