I have quite a few things here Mr. Steve. I will break them out into other messages if you prefer or think that will be more efficient. Many of these are perhaps a long time wishlist and not immediately necessary. Some of them, such as the ones regarding the layout of the tables (for instance the wide horizontal scrolling when there are a lot of fields on a table) might already be manageable, perhaps with adjustments by dataface programmers to the smarty templates? So I am just tossing them all out here now to record them:
Parent Record Fields displayed when editing a child record.
Similarly if editing a relationship record, that you got to by clicking in a relationship, perhaps some way of displaying the originating record info and table name so we know where we were coming from? (Back button of course would yield some errors on occasion if we had edited and saved information.)
Display Tab (Just like Detail but only Displays data, no editing capability)
Option to display NO fields in list (or detail or display) so individual fields can be turned on instead of turning lots of fields off. (If the Dataface Configurator is created then this might be moot)
All buttons such as action menu, search field etc. displayed on left. (If the table is long then we currently have to scroll horizontally to access these options.)
Have an option so that in a list records can be displayed in more than one row. (So perhaps the rows wont be so long on tables with lots of fields, especially when lots of those fields need to be seen in a list...)
How about rows in List View being displayed in a Field, with only certain fields displayed (perhaps using a concat). Then a display (or even edit) form displayed to the right/left/bottom/top of this scrolling field. Then as you scroll up and down in this field, the rest of the fields change to display info for the highlighted record.
Dataface Report writer. Basically very much what dataface already is, but the option to display the same info without all of the links and so on that make the Dataface program. (Of course a report writer is more complex than what I just said, But I think dataface has a lot of the basics built in and could eventually be a fantastic report writer in some circumstances.)
Support to display Views just as the current ability to support tables. (Thus relationships would be built into MySQL)
On the Menu on the left we have the ability to change the display name for a table in the conf.ini file under the [_tables] section. Thus a statement contacts_table = "Contact Information" causes the term Contact Information to display on the menu on the right. If however contacts_table is a part of a relationship from another table, the tab for the relationship would say contacts_table and not "Contact Information". Perhaps a way exists to modify this as well to either make it say the same thing or something entirely different?
Option to have find display LIST instead of Detail. (Perhaps a checkbox so if we want to go to first record found in Detail mode or to go to a list instead...)
Ability to store in a config file (or later in a preferences for users) to determine the standard number of records to display in List mode. Rather than the currently 30 automatically.
If in a list, display beside each record the number of the current record of the SET. Thus if it is part of a find and 100 records are found than this record is 3 of that hundred.
Box to enter what page you wish to go to, rather than just a link for the next 30 (next 100 etc)
Primary Key field displayed in FIND, just in case.
Custom Sidebar instructions. I LOVE the sidebar in find. It is fantastic. This would be a nice feature to have for all the dataface screens. With the info stored in a database so users or admins could updated it. In addition a sidebar for a user to be able to add her own comments to a page in the program, for personal notes, reminders how to do this or that, etc.
Dataface in Dataface not just configs. (This is actually the dataface configurator we spoke about on the other board. In the basics and to start it should just be a database of all options in dataface. I can set this up once i know the options, I'll just set up a bunch of MySQL tables. Then, even if Dataface itself does not integrate to it, we could write out the config files....Which brings up, can dataface write out text files? If not perhaps that could be a feature request.
All buttons, find, save, etc at the top and bottom.
From what I see in the comments it appears this is already existing but just in case, Dataface to call stored procedures? (Currently I am working on triggers, which Dataface wont need to implement since they are done automatically..for things like a history table...but stored procedure access would also be nice...)
Have the ability to manipulate, search, etc a subset of data. (Perhaps simply using stored procedures? or stored procedures to copy data to a copy table?)
Can dataface create tables itself? (I am assuming it can if we input the SQL directly?)
Can dataface Display (for debugging or learning purposes for instance) the SQL calls it makes, the same way PHPMyAdmin does? (With the ability to turn that feature off so regular users cannot do so?
Could dataface have the ability to have an SQL input field?