wizard353 wrote on Tuesday, July 14, 2015:
Jerry,
There are many improvements that I would like to see in the LBV forms. I had hoped to make some of them myself, but other things seem to get in the way. Some should be simple, other would require major restructuring.
1] Change the allowable number of LBV item entry fields to 999,999. The current version allows item numbers only between 1 and 999. Given my habit of thinking two steps forward, and one back, I seem to spend a lot of time renumbering fields when I want to insert something that I forgot the first time around. If there are a lot of line numbers to work with, I can just start with numbers incrementing by 100 to leave room for future insertions.
For extra credit, you could write a “RENUM” function, like we had in GWBASIC, that would take 4 arguments – first line number, last line number (of the lines to be renumbered), new starting line number, and increment to add to each newly assigned line number. However, if there were lots of possible line numbers to start with, then this would be less critical.
2] Fix the interface for creating new lists. The current version doesn’t follow typical Windows conventions and was very frustrating when I first started using it. The ability to clone a new list from an existing list would be very useful.
2.1] For my own use, I modified the list management function in edit_list.php to have 13 blank fields at the end of each list, rather than the originally programmed three entries. It was a major pain to have to save and re-load the list after every three new item entries. I just changed the “3” to “13” in line 924 of edit_list.php. (Line numbers may be a little off 'cause of documentation comments I added to my file.) The new line looks like:
for ($i = 0; $i < 13; ++$i) {
writeOptionLine('', '', '', '', 0);
3] We need a “Save and Continue” button that can be inserted at intervals within a LBV form. That way, entries made so far can be saved without closing out the whole form.
4] A feature that questions whether to abandon a changed LBV form would be useful. If you change something on the form, but do not save it, when navigating away from the form, a dialog should pop up saying something to the effect: “Form data has been changed – [Save changes and exit] [Discard Changes and exit] [Return to form]”.
5] It would be useful to have a LBV field that records the current system time if you click on it, or if it could be somehow linked to a change in another field. It should be possible to overwrite the time value, if desired, in case the time of data entry is not exactly the time that the event took place.
6] Modify the behavior of the “Groups” in a LBV form. Currently, they act only to collapse part of a form. If you could have nested groups, then, for example, my section on “Cornea” could start with normal findings, but have a subgroup for epithelial diseases and one for stromal conditions, and one for endothelial conditions. Under Epithelial diseases, There could be a group of findings for Cogan’s dystrophy, one for herpetic keratitis, and so on, much like the directory tree of your file manager.
7] I find the checkbox lists to be very useful for quickly indicating normal, common, or typical findings. I use a three column arrangement, one each for “Both eyes”, “Right eye”, and “Left Eye”, in that order. Most of the time, an entry in the “Both Eyes” column suffices, but often the eyes have different individual findings.
However, if I have no special finding for the right eye, for example, then the entry for the left eye appears in the right eye column, as an unused field doesn’t appear in the finished form output. I get around this by placing a period (".") as the first entry in each checkbox list to act as a placeholder, if there is no other specific item selected for that column. It would be nice if there was an option letter applicable to checkbox list fields that would cause them to occupy their space even if they had no content selected, if they had a neighbor with active content to the right.
I don’t know if there is a size limit to a post, but I’ll submit this and then add more in a bit.
I did a lot of human factors optimization work back in the day, and would be very pleased to work with you to make the LBV forms more user friendly. I have many more suggestions, but I need to get the payroll taxes figured out tonight. Back with you in a bit.
Thanks very much,
Dave