[jira] [Commented] (SOLR-8209) Admin UI documents tab improvements

["Gus Heck (JIRA)" <ji...@apache.org>]

    [ https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SOLR-8209?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=14977528#comment-14977528 ] 

Gus Heck commented on SOLR-8209:
--------------------------------

I don't really see myself editing things in solr very often. Grid UI's are a very slippery slope in my experience, very soon you'll be getting requests for column filters and clickable sorts, in cell editing, drag and drop column reordering, Saving view configurations, some flavor of master/detail when child records are present, etc.. etc... Make a table and you will instantly be compared with either a BI tool or Excel.

Also, for fields bearing significant amounts of text a grid cell will be the worst possible UI.

/browse already has a search UI (though it seems not very robust... try pointing it at an index that doesn't have the "cat" field) maybe it would be better to improve/replace /browse with something that can handle arbitrary schema changes gracefully and just link there, or embed that in the page.

We already have 2 ways to find data in the system (3 if you count the URL in the browser with &wt=json&indent=true :) ). Maybe we should make one of those better. 

I have thought delete by query would be quite useful to have in the admin ui, though I would want it in the existing admin shard query ui (with a did you mean that prompt that could not be confirmed by accident!).

A data entry form builder might make more sense than a grid ui (to me)... 

As far as the CREATE part of CRUD goes, as you said the UI you mention is not very friendly, and has a steep learning curve. I don't think data entry via the admin UI is a real-world use case for any thing beyond a toy install. It's really a tool for new users to learn with, and experienced users to debug with. To that end, a form builder that provided a preview of the json/xml to be sent and even a preview the resulting index document if possible would be particularly good for learning the system, and help with understanding of indexed vs stored, field copying, testing out update handler configurations etc.

I agree that the "Documents" name for that tab is misleading. Perhaps rename it "Add Docs". (or whatever)

My $0.02... YMMV :)

> Admin UI documents tab improvements
> -----------------------------------
>
>                 Key: SOLR-8209
>                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SOLR-8209
>             Project: Solr
>          Issue Type: Improvement
>          Components: web gui
>    Affects Versions: 5.3
>            Reporter: Upayavira
>            Assignee: Upayavira
>
> A newbie, when clicking on the 'documents' tab might expect to, well, see documents. Instead, they see a UI that very low level allows them to post JSON/XML to add documents, etc. This presumes knowledge of Solr APIs in order to make good use of it, which goes against the intention of the UI - to make it easier for people.
> In its place, I propose to show a data-grid. This grid will contain maybe the first 100 documents in the index. It could have infinite scroll (to a certain point) to show further documents. It will have "filter" options alongside the field headings, allowing the filtering of fields (exact term match filtering, or wildcarded). 
> The left-most column will contain pencils. Clicking on this will bring up a form that allows a user to edit the document (We could be clever hear - if the index contains indexed fields that have content, we could warn people that content from those fields would be lost if documents containing those fields is re-indexed).
> At the top is a button which, when clicked, brings up a form that allows us to insert a new document. This will be a tabular view - the left column is field names (a dropdown) and the right a free text box for content.
> We could add an advanced button that brings up a q= box, allowing you to enter arbitrary queries. In time, this could expand to include a query builder - a bit like the query tab.
> We could add delete by query functionality here, too.
> We should probably have two buttons at the top - one that brings up a modal allowing the user to enter arbitrary JSON or XML for posting to Solr, and the other that brings up a modal allowing the user to upload a file from their filesystem - this means we retain the essential functionality that is currently present in the documents tab.
> Basically, we give a very straightforward view of the content of an index, much like one would in a relational database tool.



--
This message was sent by Atlassian JIRA
(v6.3.4#6332)

---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscribe@lucene.apache.org
For additional commands, e-mail: dev-help@lucene.apache.org