Forum ‹ BigDB ‹ my suggestions

[Tsuken]

template suggestion:
Just a simple suggestion to be able to add a template (or more) to a table. This template would only be used in the admin panel. For example, you have a table which might need many properties. To prevent having to re-create each property for each object you add, you could make a template with the properties that you want each object in your table to have. You would simply fill out the template for each new object you make in that table.

To illustrate what I mean:
http://playerio.com/documentation/bigdb/example
Look at "Description" on the image at "Level Data". It shows how you decided what the structure of each object in the table should be:
levelname = (
Started:0
Completed:0
BestScore:0
)
The admin panel would be much more usable if you could store the required structure in a template. Each time you clicked "new object" on that table, it would already create the properties stored in the template.

I hope that made sense, I'm not very good at explaining

[Tsuken]

I also have other suggestions:
Give the ability to edit the key of an object. If you made a typo or later want to change the name/key of the object, it's quite annoying to have to recreate the whole object again.

I find the "save changes" button to be a bit redundant. For example, I could have a property "cost", I change the cost from 100 to 300, I then have to press "okay", but it won't save it yet, I still also have to press "save changes". I would like to see the "okay" button saving the changes. It has happened to me few times already that I forgot to press the "save changes" button and had to redo the contents of the object.

[Oliver]

change key> It's on a list of possible future feature-additions for bigdb.

save changes> Some people like being able to make a bunch of changes to an object, but still be able to revert those change if they make a mistake. That's why the flow is View -> Make a bunch of changes -> Ensure that they're okay -> Click Save.
I can see how it's not the shortest flow when you just want to change a single property, but we believe the benefits outweighs the cost.

- Oliver

[Tsuken]

save changes > But when you create the object for the first time I think it should save as soon as you press "okay". Because you aren't updating data, you are inserting data. I doubt anyone wants to revert back to not filling out the object properties. Or perhaps my problem is that there is no alert message that tells me I haven't saved my changes yet. It's easy to skip pressing "save changes" by accident. It has happened to me a few times already and I bet I'm not the only one, so it's worth mentioning. If I knew I was the only one, I would not bother posting about it.

But what about the template suggestion? I often have to make objects with the same properties, but then I have to recreate each property separately for each object, which will also make mistakes and typos (and therefore bugs) more likely to happen.

[MrBiscuits]

I agree that template functionality would make BigDB much more user friendly. I've got around 20 fields for each monster type in my game and it involves recreating every field for each monster around 150 times.

Even the ability to copy an object and then edit it would speed things up a lot.

[Oliver]

We will not add a template object to bigdb tables. It's the wrong solution. For instance, what happens when you edit the template object after you've already got millions of objects in your table?

If you want to have the same properties on all objects, either always add them from your code, or take the clever approach: Only put properties on objects if they're different than a defaultValue.

For instance, if user.points should start at 0, just assume that it's zero if the property user.points does not exist.

-Oliver