This has bothered me for a couple years now, but it finally came to a head while adding thousands of machines to an onboarding plan.
Throughout vRA and vRO, we are subjected to completely different experiences with tables in the web ui. I am guessing that different devs in different groups at different times decided to implement these tables differently. But I really wish somebody would just come back around and make the experience better and more consistent.
Sorting
On some tables, you can click on a field name to sort it. On some, you cannot. And maybe due to not being implemented yet or maybe due to bugs, sometimes you can click on the field name and nothing happens. Or it sorts the results in a seemingly random order.
This isn't much of an ask. If you're building a table, allow it to be sorted by field names. I understand some fields may not make sense to sort by, like tags for example. But for the fields where it obviously makes sense, just allows us to sort.
Filtering
In some tables, we can filter for values. In some we cannot. When we can, sometimes it's a search/filter bar above the table. Other times it's a sort option on a field header. Sometimes certain fields can be filtered and others cannot.
When it comes to the "how", I don't have a dog in that fight, but just allow us to filter tables by fields. Really, any fields in the table. Wildcards should be supported and should work as described (which is not always the case, e.g. a "starts with" actually function as a "contains").
Paging
Some tables don't have pages. Some tables have "hard" pages. Some tables have "infinite scroll" pages. Some hard pages let you set the page size, some don't.
First, not sure if somebody actually asked for them or if they are just "cool", but i don't see a place for inifinte scroll anywhere in the product. Not going to die on that hill or anything, but i don't know who it's for. I had to deal with those on the Add Machines portion of the onboarding plan. Literally had to add thousands of machines but had to scroll 20 at a time. Just why?
If it were up to me, we would just have "hard" pages but be able to set the page size to relatively large numbers. I don't think requesting 200 items is really that less efficient than requesting 20. Also, would love if the page size settings could live with my account so that I don't have to constantly change it.
Check All
For the love everything holy, please make the "check all" checkbox actually check all objects. As of now, it's a "check all on this page" checkbox. Again, not sure who that is for. But if that particular functionality is needed, then give us two check boxes - one for the page and one for everything. the "check all -> next page -> check all -> next page -> check all -> ..." experience is just terrible. And as mentioned above it is even worse with the "infinite scroll" paging.
Columns
When we can choose columns, like for the list of deployments, could that be stored with our account as well. It's basically useless if refreshing the page just sets everything back to the default. I mean, then just make the default all columns if that's how it's going to work.
In Summary
All I want is a pleasant and consistent experience when interacting with tables across these products. When we started with 8.1, the assumption was that these little quirks would get figured out along the way. After all, this seems to be an agile team, so I thought these little things would be fixed over various iterations. But it seems like the only thing we can count on is an inconsistent and sometimes frustrating table experience.
And I do appreciate the effort to fix "real" bugs and introduce useful new features, but please don't forget that we actually interact with these products as well.
Thanks for listening.
