Monster Life Breeding and Play Reference (WIP)

I like [MENTION=128]Stereo[/MENTION];'s idea. I really like the drop-down menu, it is much cleaner than having 20+ tabs at the bottom. I don't care for the "type" column though, it just makes the table messy, especially for long names like Aliens and Humanoids, Dogs, etc.

Yeah, I didn't realize GoogleDocs was going to have some dumb restrictions on how this stuff works. If I went ahead with filling the rest of the data in, I'd probably use another hidden table or two to tidy that sort of thing up for the leading spreadsheet.

 Gripes

SQL's 'GROUP BY' is the main offender. The syntax to define what you do with each group is sorely lacking; there's no way to tell it to pick the row with the largest value in a particular column, and then to do other operations using that row (eg. ORDER BY the value, to get sorting done during the select).

This is fine now, but once there are more than 50 farms for a given type, it'll cause problems where I can't make it pick the top 50. I guess I can toss in a 'max(update date)' column and order by update date, so that the most recent updates return first.

Ways of representing a range of values is next on the list, it doesn't seem to be possible to say "A1:A & C1:J" in certain places where it'd be useful (eg. when retrieving the result of a query). Instead I have to get all columns A to J, and then manually copy the ones I'm interested in over to the primary table of interest.

The dropdown is mostly laziness on my end, it's problematic in that it propagates the change to anyone viewing the spreadsheet, rather than being an individual view of the results. Might still be nicer to use overall as long as the spreadsheet's not very busy. Of course, it's easy enough to duplicate and lock whichever monster types are popular to view, as long as I write the whole deal into a single sheet. I'll develop it with that in mind, and if it becomes a problem I can just make copies of each type.


Reliable users (as in visiting their farm regularly to update it with the same types)... hmm. It'd definitely be feasible to have a separate sheet listing all their farm names (with room for notes - contact info on SP or whatever) and then query that sheet for each farm on the front page to fill in a reliability column, or to sort the output with those farms on top. It would be easy to make that sheet editable by anyone trusted to make that call.

Some of this stuff is just a matter of replacing the default array fills (note to self: 'NOEXPAND(QUERY())') and changing the behaviour to look nicer using IFs. For example, I like the look of the data better with empty cells instead of 0's, both because it's less to read and less to input. But it's easy enough to wrap it in IF(string0"' ; "" ; string) type logic and be able to accept it either way, which is probably more robust for general usage anyway. And the '--' entries are ugly and behave funny; I'd get rid of those.


I'm implementing some of these things in 'Copy of Information' tab to make sure they actually work; check that out.
[edit] that tab now has some of these features running, seems quite doable. Also found out how to hide columns so it doesn't have a bunch off to the right.