[ckan-dev] Data Viewer bugs/problems

[Mark Wainwright]

Hi all,

I have been trying to use the data viewer with a view to blogging
about it and writing it up for ckan.net, but it still seems to be
riddled with problems at the moment. I wrote about problems with the
graphing earlier - here are the results of my trying to play with the
table view. I was using the famous Gold Prices:
<http://thedatahub.org/dataset/gold-prices/resource/b9aae52b-b082-4159-b46f-7bb9c158d013>.

The columns have column heads, and here the problems begin.

(1) The column heads should not scroll away when the table data is
scrolled - they should be fixed.

Each column has a drop-down menu.

(2) This drop-down falls to the right of the column, and is contained
entirely within the widget, so for the right-hand column, the items on
the menu are unreadable.

This could be at least partly fixed if the whole column head were the
menu button, rather than the column head having a Google-ish gearwheel
as the button. (Eliminating the gearwheel button would also make the
headings look less messy when they are quite long; see e.g.
<http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7041/6874260788_720e90b277.jpg>.)

One of the items on the menu is called 'Hide this column'. If you hide
a column, a drop-down menu appears as a narrow leftmost column, giving
you the option to show it again.

(3) However, in this column, a dummy but confusing drop-down also
appears in every row, with no entries or functionality.

On the menu appear these filtering-type options:

* Term Facet
* Date Histogram Facet
* Text Filter

(4) Term Facet does the same as Text Filter, except that you have to
choose the value you want from a drop-down instead of typing it in a
box, and only ten values are visible. If more than ten values exist,
the remainder are unreachable.

(5) The ten values chosen seem quite arbitrary. They may even be
values that do not exist in your current view (because of other
filters etc in force).

(6) Having added a facet, there is no way to remove it. You can close
the widget showing the facets, but that just means you can't see it -
the effect on the columns is permanent until you facet by a different
value or reload the entire page.

(7) Date Histogram Facet appears to do nothing at all.

Mark

-- 
Mark Wainwright, CKAN Community Co-ordinator
Open Knowledge Foundation http://okfn.org/
Skype: m.wainwright