problem with alphabetical sorting
When the list of movies, actors or some grouped listing are sorted, it is done strictly according to the charset (ASCII?). This results in listing all uppercase titles first, followed by lowercase titles. While people use the complete titles without moving "The" to the end of it, and while using english titles (usually all words are capitalized), this doesn't matter much, but when there are lots of German (or french, italian, etc) titles, and/or when moving articles to the end, many titles suddenly appear at the end of the movielist instead of being alphabetically sorted together with the capitalized words. Similar also applies to special characters like "-", "'", "(", etc, and also to special local characters like äöüÄÖÜß, èéêùúû, etc which partially appear before uppercase, between upper and lowercase, and after lowercase.
It would be nice to be able (either by default or selectable by an option) to sort all special chars together at one place (either before or after all other chars), and most of all to sort chars according to the local language or in some other merged way, at least ignoring upper and lowercase, or even eg AaÀàÁáÄä together, followed by Bb, etc
problem with autocompletion
In my database, I have added several custom items, including "select list". When I want to select a value in such a list by typing the first few chars, two effects occur:
The chars i type are taken literally including uppercase and lowercase, and autocompletion only takes the rest of the string from the selection list. Since the typed chars are taken as typed but it looks as if the field was automatically filled with an existing value, I already ended up several times in unintentionally creating a new value which I couldn't easily see (because of the sorting problem, see above).
Example: A value "Disney" already exists in the selection list, but i simply type "d". Autocompletion makes "disney" from it, and when i accept, a new value is created. Sorting or grouping by this field will later cause this new value to show up at the end behind all uppercase values (A ... Disney ... Z ... disney) and the record seems to be missing in the database when i look at the "Disney" group.
It would be nice when case would also be adjusted automatically, although i recognize the problem of "how to add a new value starting with different case if a value starting with those letters already exists"
I have no perfect solution for it, but wanted to explain the small problem i have with the current situation. Maybe in the meantime, autocompletion could match the exact case only, which would require a little more carefulness (also using the shiftkey instead of "just typing"), but avoid unintentional additional values.
Another problem with autocompletion is a bit more strange:
In a custom select list, i have (amongst others) the values "Horror - King", "Stephen King", and "King Kong". And here is what the autocompletion does:
- on typing "step", I get "stephen King"
- on typing "horr", I get "horror - King"
(both as expected, with lowercase problem: see above)
- on typing "stephen ", I get "stephen "
- on typing "horror ", I get "horror "
(both: why is the rest no longer completed when i type the space?)
- on typing "stephen ki", I get "stephen king Kong"
(rest is completed again, but: what kind of completion is THAT?)
(at least i had a good laugh on Stephen's new nickname :-)
- on typing "horror - ki", I get "horror - ki"
(rest still is no longer completed after i type space and "-",
and it is also not even completed as above like "horror - king Kong")
Is the autocompletion done by PVD by doing some patternmatching, and the regex and stringoperations cause also unintentional matches like the "Stephen King Kong"? When i programmed something with a listbox in one of my programs, i set flags to ignore case and to alphabetically sort the list. When I type something in the editfield of that dropdownlist now, it doesn't show autocompletion, but opening the pulldown or using wheel or cursorkeys shows the first value which matches these typed chars, making it easy to use mousewheel or cursor-up/down to select an existing value (including the correct case of the characters), and the preselection of a value speeds up scrolling to the intended value, most importantly in very long lists.
Of course, this is only my personal approach in one of my programs, but for my style of working, it worked out: type a few chars (without watching for correct case), use the wheel or cursor (even a single "down" will do), and get to a correctly spelled existing value fast. For these abilities and less other problems, i would gladly sacrifice a shown autocompletion :-)
ps: another small general problem with the select lists is that after editing a record, typing a new value for a select list, and applying the changes, this value won't be considered for autocompletion on editing another record later, unless i have first clicked the arrow to pulldown the selection list at least once: The list of values seems to not be updated automatically, and i have to force such an update by showing the list manually once.