add sortable columns for Open/Share Solutions, plus other usability features

Started by LociOiling

LociOiling Lv 1

The Open/Share Solutions dialog, which identifies itself as "Manage Solutions", has a number of limitations which make it difficult to use. This is particularly noticeable on the current series of CACHE puzzles, where in theory, there could be 1,739 different compounds in play, each with multiple solutions.

The dialog always lists solutions in descending score order. As soon as a solution is saved, or another change is made, the dialog refreshes, with the top scores again going to the top of the display. If you just saved a lower-scoring solution, you must now scroll to find it in order to share it.

The current dialog does not have columns as such, but the score, solution name, save time, and description could be treated as columns. (The save time is not currently displayed for manual saves, but it's presumably in there somewhere. For auto and quick saves, the time is displayed in the description field.)

The current dialog does have two checkboxes, "Show only my solutions", and "Show auto and quick saves". There could be a "Sort by" section, with score, name, time, and description as options, plus additional boxes for ascending/descending. The sort key would be one "radio button" set of mutually exclusive options, and ascending/descending would be another.

A search box, similar to the one in the puzzles menu, would be another useful feature. It would search for matching text in the score, name, and description fields. A simple search (no wildcards) would be good enough.

The ability to work with multiple solutions would also be helpful in some cases. Each solution could have its own checkbox, and multiple solutions could be selected by simple checking/unchecking. (Selecting ranges of solutions might be useful in some cases, but shift-clicking or the like might be more difficult to implement.)

jeff101 Lv 1

I like many of the above ideas.

"The ability to work with multiple solutions would also be helpful in some cases."

This would help if you wanted to share 30 different local solutions with scientists.
Select all 30 and then send all 30 at once with one click instead of having to select
and share them all one by one.

This would also help if you went through the Ligand Queue, saved each structure found,
and then wanted to share them all with your teammates. Once shared with the group,
each teammate could select all of the shared Ligand Queue results and then download
them all at once using just one click.

Another idea is to have more "share with" options. Often I want to share the same solution
with both my group and the scientists. Having the buttons "share with self", "share with
group", "share with scientists", and "share with both group and scientists" would be very
helpful. It would also help to have in the left column one copy for each solution instead of
the present system with one copy of the solution shared with yourself, another shared with
group, and another shared with scientists. There could be symbols like Unix's drwxrwxrwx
for each solution; that is, for each solution there could be 3 characters, perhaps x-- for a
solution shared with yourself, -x- for one shared with your group, --x for one shared with
scientists, and -xx for one shared with both group and scientists.

jeff101 Lv 1

I also like Loci's ideas about being able to sort and search the solutions listed.

If the search idea cannot be implemented, it would help to at least have the
options "Show my own solutions", "Show solutions by others", and "Show all
solutions". I often store many of my own solutions on the server, but sometimes
I just want to see ones shared by my teammates. Right now, there is no option
to let me do this.

LociOiling Lv 1

I like the "shared by others" option.

There are also some additional ideas I forgot to mention.

First, the "Manage Solutions" dialog occupies a fixed location on the screen. It would be nice to have a title bar so that it could be dragged to another position. Sometimes, the details you want to mention in a solution name or description are hidden by window.

Second, the dialog should be resizable, both vertically and horizontally. This would allow viewing more solutions at a time, and could also let users see long descriptions that tend to get truncated.

Third, a hover option could reveal a more complete solution information. A long description gets truncated by "…", but there's no option to see the entire description. Hovering over a solution could show the complete description in a bubble, similar to what happens when hovering over a recipe in the cookbook.