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actually interactive data-hunting wizards
Friday, January 13 2017
Gretchen went to the dump today, mostly to get rid of carpet fragments from her library. Initially she'd intended on taking both basement computers to the dump as well (neither has been used in over ten years), but I intervened to salvage what I could first: a perfectly-good ATX case, an Atom 330 motherboard, two hard drives with over 100 gigabytes of storage each, two DVD burners, a pair of seemingly-good speakers, and various cables and mice. I knew Gretchen wouldn't be happy unless she took something to the dump, so I left her a Pentium IV motherboard (with no memory, battery, or CPU), an empty mini-ATX case (with no power supply), a couple crappy old keyboards, and an 1280 X 1024 LCD display, the very first perfectly-good LCD display I have thrown away. Between its clunk wide frame, its low resolution, and a scratch that it had developed on its face, I was ready to say goodbye. (I'd originally bought pair of them for over $300 each back in the early 2000s.)
In the process of procrastinating scarier server work, today I added a fun new feature to the increasingly-elaborate reporting tool that has become my favorite work-related project. I'd already made it so that when creating the form to run a report (which is defined using JSON), one could specify a SQL statement to populate an HTML SELECT dropdown. But in the past that SQL could contain no parameters, so the dropdown it produced always had to be the same. Today, though, I changed all that. I made it so other inputs in the form could be referred to by name using the industry-wide @name convention already used for passing parameters to the report-generating SQL expressions such that when the values of those inputs were changed, the SELECT dropdown would be regenerated using the new values. This capability, combined with the new show/hide capability, now makes it possible to create reports that are actually interactive data-hunting wizards. These can change and reveal themselves as the user makes his or her way through. My knowledge of Javascript is now so encyclopedic that I didn't have to consult any reference material to make any of this new functionality.
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