Add dropdowns with filter (to everywhere)

Hey,

I am now creating a database and tables. It's a bit of a pain going through the collation list in dropdown searching for the one I want.

Would it be possible to add a filter? Like you click on the dropdown to expand and then start typing to filter out the one you want.

This would be useful wherever we have big dropdowns. Thanks

These drop-downs support a "find as you type" feature. Just start typing text when it has focus, e.g "utf8", and you will see the list focuses the first one matching to it.

Hey,

It finds the first letter, but if I type the second and shifts to a completely different place.

Then you need to type quicker.

I hope that you are just joking and that you understand that that is not an ideal solution.

What I was hoping is something like this:

Here you can see I am typing the value and the dropdown is going to my selection (no actual items are removed, but you could add similar behavior to the filtering of tables)

No I was not joking. I know that this is not ideal. However, allow free typing is an idea, but that would throw errors from the server if you mistype your collation, right?

Sorry, I don't follow. How would it throw errors? When you type you are not selecting anything until you click. You are typing to navigate to the thing you want to select.

At least that is how I understand it, but even if you do the way you are saying, lets say you have X selected and you start typing something invalid, then no selection is made.

That is correct. But you may also type a word which is not in the list. So for example:

That would result in an SQL error when saving:

ALTER TABLE `mytable`
    CHANGE COLUMN `oid` `oid` VARCHAR(100) NOT NULL COLLATE 'utf8_NOTEXIST' AFTER `uid`;
/* SQL Error (1273): Unknown collation: 'utf8_NOTEXIST' */

If you accept any value, yes, but if you check for the value in the list when the user presses enter or deselects then this could be avoided.

By default a value is selected when a field is created, so, then when the user tries to change it, the user must select a valid one, if no valid one is selected (the user typed the wrong thing) a popup error message shows up telling the user of an invalid selection and the selection doesn't change. The user could also press ESC to just cancel the search.

I have seen this exact behavior in other applications with editable dropdowns. I believe this would be a valuable addition to HeidiSQL

Yes, that's definitely worth a try. I just did the following for the next build:

• allow free typing in the collation drop-down
• assume an empty string in case the user typed a non existent item (instead of an error dialog)

Please try that out, and tell me what you think about it. Click Help > "Check for updates" to get the next build (available in some minutes).

Just tried it out and it looks great:

One thing I would add, is if the user presses ESC then cancel the change. Currently if I type something and press ESC (or the box loses focus) I get what the text I wrote selected, would be nice if it just cancelled, but this is just a very minor thing to add.

I think this is a great improvement and will make selections like this much much easier and if possible all the dropdowns where you have multiple items should have this.

Great work man, really great work. Thanks!!