Sunday, April 15, 2012

IBM ED Search for Android - Part 4

Change Indicators

A result of a search or the list of persons in a bluegroup might change over time. If you trigger a reload of the search result new persons might be added, others might be removed.

To better understand these changes the app uses change indicators. These are narrow colored lines to the left of the person picture. New persons in a search result will have a green line, persons removed will have a red line and persons where the information in the directory has changed since the last time it was loaded will have a yellow line.



It should be pointed out that persons that are no longer part of the search result will not be deleted from the device. Instead they are marked with the red change indicator. This has the following advantages:
  • If you still want to have that person record available in the app you can choose to star the person and it will be available under All Starred Persons
  • You can see who has been removed from a bluegroup
The change indicators are displayed in the person search result until they are actively confirmed. To confirm them trigger the action with the check mark icon from the action bar. After confirming the changes all indicators are removed and the persons that are no longer part of the search result (the ones that had the red change indicator) are actually deleted.

In case the change indicators are not confirmed and the search result is reloaded again new change indicators will be added to the existing ones.

Therefor, it is possible that more than one change indicator will be shown for a person. When a person was added to a bluegroup for example and later the information about that person changed in the directory a green and yellow change indicator will be shown. Likewise, when the person was first added and then later removed a green and red change indicator will appear.



Note that persons marked with a red change indicator might have left the company and are no longer in the directory. When you try to load the person details for such a person the app will display a short message that the person could not be found in the directory.

You can also apply a filter for change indicators to restrict the results shown to only new, changed or deleted persons. A future post will cover filtering.


No comments: