Unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend this week’s Q&A session. Steven asked if anyone had tried re-creating the Task List app; I didn’t do that, but I did try to create a similar, very simple app (subset of an address book).
To summarize my feelings : tedious.
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Data binding. Why is there no “bind everything that matches by name” button?
In the quick mini-demo, we got to see Steven click on each entry in the collection in turn, and then click on the matching field. Tedious. -
Form creation. There could be a default form creation that simply makes a field (say 80% wide, labelled, each one below the previous) for each entry in the collection.
3, Default add / edit / update form/code.
Let me just give you the collection definition ( and maybe some additional info such as text vs number vs …) and have it make me a “create” and an “update” form, with appropriate Cancel / Save / Duplicate / Delete … buttons.
Given the above (or a better thought-through version of them :-), the Task List app would have taken 5 minute to create, with no frustrating ‘housekeeping’ to be done. And if I wanted some refinements (e.g. the first and last names on the same line) then I could easily add that.
And of course you could extend that to a default “overview” table, and filtering by specified fields within hte record.
That would (I think) make it really quick and simple to create simple database apps - and provde a base for many real apps, almost all of which will have some collection that the user will want to edit/update.
