Improve drop down list.

Nicolas CHIGROS

Context:

Currently is it difficult to do a drop down list properly in Board if you intent to work
with the stored values.

 In Layout designer and Data Entry section, you generally use "suggested values from
Entity". However, it doesn't work properly if :

• You have localized the entity but multiple user on the same data perimeter.
• Know the description may evolve
• Description aren't unique (the code is intelligible for the end user and/or very long).
• …

 You can make the block a button with an interactive selection instead but it slower
than a dropdown list to use and user mostly dislike the ergonomic of it. But it
is in a lot of use cases the way to go in my opinion to work around the issues
listed above.

My Idea :

I see two ways to improve current situation :

1. In Layout designer and Data Entry section, for suggested values from "Entity" add the option to select what is displayed in the Dropdown list independently from what is stored. Board would do the conversion from stored to display, meaning the "Suggested values" may be use outside of "Data Entry" situations to do reporting where you need to display the description in read only. This would allow localization to work and solve issue if label is rename in the future.
   
2. Another possibility would be to add a new datatype for cubes : Entity. Like shown in the mock up bellow. Ideally either at creation time Board would create a matching view of that Entity cube. That view would be of type single with the all entities defined in the structure section as dimensions and the entity set in the datatype would be added as dimension too. Then Board would automatically be converting the values from the Entity cube to the Single cube and convert operation from one to another. It would eliminate step in procedures or in a dataflow like to do the "conversion" using extract and data readers like you have to do right now and for solution 1.