Project: Ajax Document Filter

For a corporate intranet, I created several useful AJAX apps. This example sorts a list of documents according to particular attributes. The document collection is described in an XML file by name, region, category, keywords, and commodity. The user can filter the displayed list according to those attributes.

The documents themselves were originally scattered over dozens of pages throughout this large intranet, found within duplicating, error-prone, and redundant taxonomies. After this filter was deployed, many of those pages became unnecessary and required no further maintenance effort.

The pull-downs are not static, they are populated from records in the XML file. Therefore, all select menu options return at least one result, there are no empty results from select menus. Keyword search takes place on KEYUP as user types. If results disappear, the backspace key is useful.

As to interaction design, I wrote and received approval on a functional specification delivered to the stakeholders. All wireframes and other logical artifacts were desk sketches for my use only. The UI employs some DHTML in mouseovers of the How to Use button and of the document description links

This was written for an IE-only environment, therefore I used the simpler XML data island instead of HTTP Request.