Moving Forward

I'm moving on.  The decision with lists that I discussed before is over.  I made up my mind...for now.  I don't know for sure that it was the right decision, but it feels better than the other.  Plus, my passion and excitement for Idea was slowly fading because of my indecision.  Worse than making a bad decision is giving up, so I made a decision.

A list will no longer have a specific data type.  Every list will have its own set of fields.  For example, say I wanted a list of people, and I wanted each person to have a name and an age.  I could make two lists, one with the name and one with the age, but the names and ages wouldn't be bound to each other.  Instead, I'd make a list that had a name and an age in each item.

The issue with this approach is that while it simplifies some things, it complicates others.  I won't explain how, but it really changes the concept behind lists in Idea.  I'm going to have to do a bit of re-coding.  But it's better to re-code now than later.

Now, since each list will have multiple fields, the user will need to select one as sort of the title.  In other words, when the list isn't expanded out to show all fields, which single field does it show?  Also, I think Idea should not allow any duplicates within this field.  There has to be a field that sets it apart from the others.  Of course, it would only be unique within that individual list.  There can be another Idea of the same type with an identical list item.

I think it would be a good idea to apply this concept to the idea types as well.  For example, when searching for ideas, only the "title" field would show in the results.  This could be very handy.  Plus, making list items and ideas similar means I can reuse more code.  Very convenient for me.

Anyway, that's where I am now.  I would have started coding rather than writing this post, but the day is almost over and I don't have enough time to make a dent in the code, and I wanted to finish something!  Thanks for reading!

clevceo