Posted by Scott Marquardt on 10/21/81 11:27

John Bell opined thusly on Sep 24:
> Hi
>
> I am not sure why you think the users would want to enter some cryptic code
> rather than exact values in two separate fields.

Developing more fields in this N-tier application whose upgrades are
controlled by a vendor whose dev I'm not privy to, isn't an option. If I
could do that, I would. I'm not posting to inquire about better
alternatives; I'm wanting to wring juice out of an unfortunate turnip.

> That is more of a usability
> with the UI, for instance if your parts were both numeric you may be slowing
> your users down forcing them to use non-keypad characters that require
> shifting. You should also look at the business processes, for instance if
> you processed everything for one vendor together then retaining the vendor
> information would remove the need to type it in again.
>
> If you need to concatenate the values for display purposes then you can do
> that in the code for your stored procedure or create a view.

Again, beyond my control. I've done a few necessary hacks of the software
(both the asp and some sprocs), but I can't expand the number of such edits
beyond reason. Next vendor upgrade, I'd be flailing about.

The users are more worried about being able to have reports on data they're
unfortunately left to enter in a free-form description field, type varchar.
My posting is to inquire whether a string formatting convention I'm
considering is the best I can do under that circumstance. I'd be glad of
any hints at how to most efficiently query the data as well.


--

Scott

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