ALEG

What I've done

• Another week working on the data maintenance suite, expanding the types of data fields which are handled (dates, external references), allowing no-updatable material to be display (eg, agents using this agent as a pseudonym, work count) adding selection dialogs for agents (which will be able to be generalised to work/expression/manifestation) and hierarchy selection and update dialogs. Hooked up an "edit" button to the agent search result screen.

  As with last week's comments, this has gone quite well, although a bit slower than I'd have hoped. I changed direction a few times on how to best represent which updates to a complex topic (such as an agent) have been made in the data structure passed from the web client to the server. But it is close to "right" now.

  The main things to do now is complete the data structure which represents the changes made and send it to the server for updating the database.

  I thought about using the "drag 'n drop" approach for various tasks which require a selection to be made. The main alternative is to simply select the selection from "popup" dialog, and I've gone with this approach for now as being more standard and more usable especially on smaller screen sizes.

• More discussions on search screens

• Document how ALEG will handle some tricky cases - The "Poets of the Month" works from the mid 1970's and "Down the Lake with Half a Chook". These are amongst the most "difficult" cases Tessa and Kathy can come up with, so if we think the proposed data model can handle these, we'll be happy!

• Continue on the data maintenance (input) suite - finalize the prototype agent maintenance screens.

• Continue discussions on user interface presentation options, sort orders, long -v- brief displays

• Start loading the now finalised Austlit data in the new database.

• Hopefully something to show on data maintenance next week.

Link of the week: