Re: pgAdmin v4.1 - positive feedback

Comments inlined.

 

Thank you,

Laurent.

 

From: Dave Page <dpage@pgadmin.org>
Sent: Tuesday, January 22, 2019 04:42
To: ldh@laurent-hasson.com
Cc: Mark Murawski <markm-lists@intellasoft.net>; pgadmin-support@lists.postgresql.org
Subject: Re: pgAdmin v4.1 - positive feedback

 

Hi

 

On Tue, Jan 22, 2019 at 3:55 AM ldh@laurent-hasson.com <ldh@laurent-hasson.com> wrote:

Let me join the chorus... To some degree, my complaints seem minor today compared to 1y ago, so it’s much improved. My organization made the move to Postgres 11, so I had no choice but to get re-acquainted with PGAdmin4 since III doesn't work at all anymore.

So here are some suggestions. I know, it's easy to make suggestions, and I wish I knew how to code the client-side so I could make some contribs, but I also think those suggestions may be fairly simple. Could you suggest some participation I could provide to help? Ticket, tracking, maybe doc?

  - One of the simplest features of PGAdmin III that I find myself missing EVERY DAY is simply the timer on the bottom right of the query window. When running queries, I often know how long they will take and so having that simple timer while the query runs is very useful 😊

 

Would having a timer display on the "Waiting for query to execute..." busy screen work? You'd then see that whilst it was executing, followed by the "Execution complete" notification (which includes the time), and of course the time that's shown on the history panel.

[Laurent Hasson] Yes, that would work.

 

  - Another simple feature is the ability to continue editing some queries while one query runs. I often manage multiple queries and on III, i would run one query while editing/fixing/preparing the next query in the same editor. I know I could open another editor but it's just not as convenient, and on the browser, no quick ALT-TAB.

 

Please log a feature request at https://redmine.postgresql.org/projects/pgadmin4/issues/new. Restricting the busy screen to the 4 output tabs doesn't seem like it would be too hard. My main concern would be the UX of doing so.

[Laurent Hasson] Understood on the UX and I can see why it was done that way. I guess I am used to the behavior of III where that is possible: greater brain bandwidth imho than having to switch tabs. Running a large query is something I do often and I kinda work in parallel all the time. You can do that in Toad, SQLServer Studio, or PGAdmin III so I think it’s a behavior most devs would be familiar with… Feature #3920 has been created.

 

You can switch between top level tabs with Alt/Option + Shift + [ and Alt/Option + Shift + ] by default. That can be changed under File -> Preferences -> Browser -> Keyboard Shortcuts.

[Laurent Hasson] Ah, so this is interesting. I have been having problems with keyboard shortcuts. Even saving has been problematic without clicking on the save icon. I guess I can’t figure out what the keyboard config is. I have an older IBM mechanical keyboard, on Windows, what’s the combination of keys by default (I haven’t customized that)?. But anyways, I have found getting rid of the brain scarification around Alt-Tab really hard… 😊

 

  - More importantly, I find the backend still flaky. I am still experiencing frequent backend errors, or reaching a state where the whole front-end is broken. Short of going to the system tray and killing the backend server, there is no other way. I used to go to the Task Manager until I recently discover the "kill server" option on the tray. It'd be nice to have a menu option to "restart" the server from the browser UI and allow the UI to just survive a backend meltdown.

 

In what way is it flaky? It's been designed so that even when errors occur, they typically only affect that operation (unlike pgAdmin 3 which would just crash entirely). The whole architecture makes it inherently far more robust against such issues. Please log tickets and provide logs showing any errors, particularly un-recoverable ones.

[Laurent Hasson] I’ll have to capture logs or screenshots yes… Now that I know how to file issues, I’ll follow up with more details. But I get a variety of system errors on a regular basis and the UI is no longer responsive: I can click on a schema node for example and there would be the “progress” twirling icon going on forever, and the main dashboard would show red tiles with error messages, and I wouldn’t be able to launch a new query window or anything. Short of closing the browser window, killing the server and restarting, I haven’t found a way to recover.

 

Thank you,

 

--

Dave Page
Blog: http://pgsnake.blogspot.com
Twitter: @pgsnake

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