Tech Forum

So in MLS if you choose the menu Organizations > (Choose any, I will say Sunday School) > and then move down to the 'Members' section. Now, type in a name that would be toward the bottom of the list, you will notice that it scrolls the list down, but not to the correct name. I therefore have to scroll and find the name to remove them from the class.

Is anyone else seeing this?

tietjen wrote:So in MLS if you choose the menu Organizations > (Choose any, I will say Sunday School) > and then move down to the 'Members' section. Now, type in a name that would be toward the bottom of the list, you will notice that it scrolls the list down, but not to the correct name. I therefore have to scroll and find the name to remove them from the class.

I'm guessing that the confusing point is that there are several lists in the "Class Members" section; each Sunday School class has its own list of class members. There is an outer scroll bar on the far right side that controls where you are in the collection of lists. Then each class list may have its own inner scroll bar (depending on the number of members in that class). In my experience, using the name search feature to search for a member of a particular class will indeed cause that member to become visible within the class list. But depending on the position of the outer scroll bar, the bottom of that class may not be visible within the outer window, so the selected person may be in a portion of the class list that is below the bottom of the outer window.

If this is indeed what you are seeing, you can avoid the problem in one of two ways:

• Use the outer scroll bar to position the class so that you see the entire scrollable region for the class you are interested in.
• Use the topmost "Show:" dropdown to select the desired class. Depending on the size of your MLS window, there may still be an outer scroll bar that you may need to use to position the class list to include the bottom of the list, but this will generally work.

I suppose that MLS could also be changed so that when the name search feature is used, the outer list would be scrolled if necessary to make sure that the bottom of the selected class is visible within the outer window. But I doubt that such a software change would be a high priority at this point.

aebrown wrote:I'm guessing that the confusing point is that there are several lists in the "Class Members" section; each Sunday School class has its own list of class members. There is an outer scroll bar on the far right side that controls where you are in the collection of lists. Then each class list may have its own inner scroll bar (depending on the number of members in that class). In my experience, using the name search feature to search for a member of a particular class will indeed cause that member to become visible within the class list. But depending on the position of the outer scroll bar, the bottom of that class may not be visible within the outer window, so the selected person may be in a portion of the class list that is below the bottom of the outer window.

If this is indeed what you are seeing, you can avoid the problem in one of two ways:

• Use the outer scroll bar to position the class so that you see the entire scrollable region for the class you are interested in.
• Use the topmost "Show:" dropdown to select the desired class. Depending on the size of your MLS window, there may still be an outer scroll bar that you may need to use to position the class list to include the bottom of the list, but this will generally work.

I suppose that MLS could also be changed so that when the name search feature is used, the outer list would be scrolled if necessary to make sure that the bottom of the selected class is visible within the outer window. But I doubt that such a software change would be a high priority at this point.

It is not the outer scroll bar issue. I have the entire inner scroll bar in view, but when I type for example my name, "tietjen", then it scrolls to the "S" names. The inner scroll bar is visible and I have to scroll down to tietjen. It shows tietjen as selected, but just doesn't bring it in the view.

tietjen wrote:It is not the outer scroll bar issue. I have the entire inner scroll bar in view, but when I type for example my name, "tietjen", then it scrolls to the "S" names. The inner scroll bar is visible and I have to scroll down to tietjen. It shows tietjen as selected, but just doesn't bring it in the view.

I'm unable to duplicate the issue you describe. If the inner scroll bar is completely visible, then using the name search always brings the selected person into view. It only works if the name search actually matches a class member, but as long as what you type matches some member of the class, it will always make that person visible.

Well that is what I was wondering, if other people saw it or not. We are still on Windows XP if that matters. It works on all the other areas in the program, but just that area seems to not bring it into view and makes it take a lot longer to go through and find people. I would be interested for anyone else to try it out and see if they see the problem or not. I am fairly certain that I am on the latest version of MLS.

tietjen wrote:I would be interested for anyone else to try it out and see if they see the problem or not.

I tried what you describe and the issue does occur. To have the searched name displayed requires scrolling on the inner scroll bar to bring the searched name into view.

I typed a members name. As I typed the list did scroll, but the name was not in the viewable window. Further manual scrolling of the list was required to bring the name into view. I tried names at different positions on the class roll to see if there was a measurable relationship between the name's position on the list and how far the window scrolled. I found that I had to search a name that was at least 29 names down the list before further scrolling was required to bring the name into view. The further the name was down the list beyond the 29th name the farther the window auto-scrolled. But the auto-scroll never did bring the name into view. It appeared to me that the auto scroll distance was about 86% of the distance down the list to the searched name.

jdlessley wrote:I tried what you describe and the issue does occur. To have the searched name displayed requires scrolling on the inner scroll bar to bring the searched name into view.

I have discovered the source of the problem. The reason I could not duplicate the problem at first is because I was using the test data, and it doesn't have any email addresses. However, I had a theory that email addresses might be a source of the problem, so I added several email addresses and indeed, the problem now occurs for me.

The problem is related to the fact that when an email address is associated with a class member (either their individual email address, or if none is specified, the household email address), the row of information displayed for a class member is made taller. This happens because the email address is placed below the phone number in the "Phone and E-mail" column. It seems clear to me that the calculation used to determine the scrolling when the name search feature is used assumes a standard row height (without an email address). So when there are several rows in the class list that are taller than the standard row height, that calculation is incorrect, and thus the window is not scrolled far enough to bring the selected row into view.

That makes sense. I checked my ward data and in those first 29 names 15 had e-mail addresses. I did not think about this before but when a search is done the result is normally displayed at the top of the list window. I was looking for names dropping off the bottom of the list window. I did a search on a name that would appear somewhere within the list window. And sure enough it was pushed down from the top of the window exactly the number of e-mail address lines that were listed before that name. There are 15 text lines displayed in the class window I was testing.

Nice find - and easily reproducible. I will get the process started to get a fix in for this.