Disable "find form" box key press search

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Disable "find form" box key press search

titleistfour

Hello,

Is there a way to disable the "find form" box from searching the database on every key press? We have almost 1,500 forms and it affects performance. Every key press takes 5-6s to respond back. This is on a server with 8 cores, 8GB RAM, locally hosted MySQL database. Would prefer if we could just enter a full word then hit enter to search on that. Is that configurable anywhere?

Thanks,
Jay

williamansley

As far as I know, there is no way to change the form search functionality. We have the same problem you do. One suggestion I will make is to take advantage of the relatively new "smart folders" feature as much as possible. (You will need to have Machform 13 or higher to have this feature.) It is much faster than "interactive searching" and if you use a "smart folder" to limit the number of forms displayed first, then "interactive searching" can become much faster.

I am not saying this is a replacement for usable search functionality. It isn't. Appnitro really needs to either make the "interactive search" in the "Form Manager" work at a reasonable speed, even with a large number of forms, or change it to wait until you have typed the full search string and pressed return or clicked a button to perform the search, instead of doing it after each key press; just as you stated above.

inthanet

Hi,
here a work around if you can edit the form_manager.js JavaScript file. The file is located is the subfolder "js" in your installation directory.

Find the following code (Line : 211 or nearby)

//filter the form when user type the search term
$("#filter_form_input").keyup(function(){
	var search_term = $(this).val();
	var max_search_result = 10;

and just replace only keyup with click

the changed code should look like this below!

//filter the form when user type the search term
$("#filter_form_input").click(function(){
	var search_term = $(this).val();
	var max_search_result = 10;

SAVE YOUR CHANGES!

That's' it!

Make sure to empty your browser cache to see the result.

What effect has this change:

Now you can enter your search string, the search start when you click with your mouse in the
search field.

williamansley

inthanet Thank you for sharing this information. The delay in seeing your keypresses when typing in the "Find Form" field in Machform installations with a lot of forms is a major annoyance at best and causes mistyped search terms and much wasted time and effort at worst. Because of this, it is tempting to make the modification you suggest. However, I would caution people to consider something before they do so; you may be exchanging one problem for another. If you change the behavior of Machform in this way, you are making it harder to use the "Find Form" field; it is not intuitively obvious that you should click on your search text after you type it in to activate the search and it certainly is not the expected behavior of a search field. This new behavior may violate accessibility requirements, as well.

The answer to this is to let people know about the change, of course, but if you have a lot of people using Machform it may be difficult to get the word out and even if you do send out a communication, my experience is that a lot of people won't read it. So you will get a lot of reports that "searching is broken in Machform".

The real solution is to either fix the code to speed up the filtering process or to change the behavior of the search field properly, by adding a button to click on to activate the search operation. And this is something that should be done by the Machform developers, and sooner, rather than later. Unfortunately, their track record of implementing important, needed fixes to Machform in a timely manner doesn't give me much hope that we will see this fix any time soon.