if you're going to have paged lists for spells ( or anything else for that matter ), then it makes sense for the pages to be indexed/organised by characters rather than numbers ( unless the items on a page actually begin their names with a number for some reason ) ... such that if I know what I'm looking for in terms of its name roughly, but can't remember exactly, I can simply enter other filters, then switch to the page beginning with that letter of the alphabet ... because paging by number doesn't help me, I have to guess roughly which page it might be ... this kind of character rather than number based indexing for paged search results should be the standard.
You can click on the "Name" header in the list to filter by name alphabetically. I think thats what your looking for. My apologizing if I'm misunderstanding your question.
No what I mean is not sorting the columns, but go down to the bottom where the pages of search results are, and you'll see the pages are numbered ... but I'm suggesting that instead of having the pages numbered, they could be labelled with characters so that if I want to switch to page K of the search results, I don't have to guess which number might represent the start of K, I can just click the one that it actually labelled with a K
Hmmm, the only problem i can see with that approach is that one page of results might contain more than 1 character of spells. I suppose you could create 26 pages, one for each character but that doesn't seem very intuitive. Paging with numbers is a pretty standard feature. Perhaps allowing you to increase the amount of results per page would work so that you didnt have to page if you didn't want to. But if you were wanting all spells that Start with "K" you could just filter with the character "K". Interesting idea, just not sure it would improve anything.
The page numbering should be dynamic not static ... the page index character should not be determined by referencing a static page, it should be generated according to the results ... so for example, if you say you want 50 results per page, and you have 52 items starting with A, then there'll be 2 pages indexed by A, one of which only has the last 2 entries of that particular search ... you get the idea?
in other words, there might be an ID number in the backend, but it isn't what the user sees as the index label on the page, which isn't determined until the page is generated ( I'm assuming by PHP? )
Hmmm, i can see the idea i guess i just don't think its any more useful than what is there now. Tomato, tomato in my mind. Would be interested in what a dev thinks of this though.
The thing is, if you build the feature once, you can utilise and adapt it to everything ... and every element of the compendium will become a lot easier to use.
think of it as advanced indexing ... if it were applied to the entire compendium, then any tag or word could be easily searched without really knowing what you're looking for ... because one of the things about search terms and categorisation, is that everyone associates things differently, and by doing this, the user starts to understand the mindset of the people who programmed it ... the more they use it, the more intuitive it seems to know how things have been categorised, named, and tagged
Each book in the D&D Beyond App utilizes this method of indezing and it is AMAZING! I would love to see the future webpage and app adopt this method but also include ALL spells from ALL books. The webpage does a good job with showing all spells and leaving a link to the book to buy if you have not purchased it but the app needs something else to cross reference the different books. Also the webpages load a set number of spells per page but I would like to see all "A" spells on one page or all "Level 1" spells on a page.
if you're going to have paged lists for spells ( or anything else for that matter ), then it makes sense for the pages to be indexed/organised by characters rather than numbers ( unless the items on a page actually begin their names with a number for some reason ) ... such that if I know what I'm looking for in terms of its name roughly, but can't remember exactly, I can simply enter other filters, then switch to the page beginning with that letter of the alphabet ... because paging by number doesn't help me, I have to guess roughly which page it might be ... this kind of character rather than number based indexing for paged search results should be the standard.
You can click on the "Name" header in the list to filter by name alphabetically. I think thats what your looking for. My apologizing if I'm misunderstanding your question.
No what I mean is not sorting the columns, but go down to the bottom where the pages of search results are, and you'll see the pages are numbered ... but I'm suggesting that instead of having the pages numbered, they could be labelled with characters so that if I want to switch to page K of the search results, I don't have to guess which number might represent the start of K, I can just click the one that it actually labelled with a K
Hmmm, the only problem i can see with that approach is that one page of results might contain more than 1 character of spells. I suppose you could create 26 pages, one for each character but that doesn't seem very intuitive. Paging with numbers is a pretty standard feature. Perhaps allowing you to increase the amount of results per page would work so that you didnt have to page if you didn't want to. But if you were wanting all spells that Start with "K" you could just filter with the character "K". Interesting idea, just not sure it would improve anything.
The page numbering should be dynamic not static ... the page index character should not be determined by referencing a static page, it should be generated according to the results ... so for example, if you say you want 50 results per page, and you have 52 items starting with A, then there'll be 2 pages indexed by A, one of which only has the last 2 entries of that particular search ... you get the idea?
in other words, there might be an ID number in the backend, but it isn't what the user sees as the index label on the page, which isn't determined until the page is generated ( I'm assuming by PHP? )
Hmmm, i can see the idea i guess i just don't think its any more useful than what is there now. Tomato, tomato in my mind. Would be interested in what a dev thinks of this though.
The thing is, if you build the feature once, you can utilise and adapt it to everything ... and every element of the compendium will become a lot easier to use.
think of it as advanced indexing ... if it were applied to the entire compendium, then any tag or word could be easily searched without really knowing what you're looking for ... because one of the things about search terms and categorisation, is that everyone associates things differently, and by doing this, the user starts to understand the mindset of the people who programmed it ... the more they use it, the more intuitive it seems to know how things have been categorised, named, and tagged
Each book in the D&D Beyond App utilizes this method of indezing and it is AMAZING! I would love to see the future webpage and app adopt this method but also include ALL spells from ALL books. The webpage does a good job with showing all spells and leaving a link to the book to buy if you have not purchased it but the app needs something else to cross reference the different books. Also the webpages load a set number of spells per page but I would like to see all "A" spells on one page or all "Level 1" spells on a page.