A quick suggestion for future army updates. Add a filter but skill family. So you can find all hackers/medic/specialists(highly classified) quickly. A couple families I can think of. Hackers Medic Air drop Infiltrators (mech deployment/forward deployment) Classified objectives profiles Stealth Martial arts Marker states Camo/visual modifiers (odd/mimitism)
Add Morat to the "veteran" and "Religious Troop" filters... and vice-versa, since it's confusing to look for Veterans in a vanilla and not see any Krakot (for example), or look for veterans in a Morat/Vanillla CA and find no angry monkey... Same for Martial Arts (and other, derived combat skills), camo, and Stealth
Just came to propose something like this. I've been using the Army to familiarice myself with some armies recently and the program itself is great, but the filter may use some improvements, now if you want to see, for example, all the hackers you have to filter one time per tipe of HD. 2 very easy ways to improve it: Now the filters works with the boolean "AND", just add an option that switch that to "OR". Doing this it'll display all the units with at least 1 of the things selected instead of with all of them Add some slots to save custom filters (the same way there are slots to save armies) inside of the filter tab/bar. That way each player can customice their own filters, for example the "Hacker" filter asked by the OP can be done by selecting all the Hacking devices with the toggle that activates OR That shouldn't be hard to code and it will improve the army a ton. Another cool update, not that necessary, would be enable filtering already filtered list. Combined with the above improvement it could let you use an "OR" filter to get all the Hackers and then apply an "AND" filter to get only the hackers with AD:Combat Jump.
Sounds like you know your queries, but I'm guessing making a such advanced options could let the user build a search that can kill a production server. That's why most user facing searches have limited options. It's not that difficult to make an SQL search that can lock up the table. I'm guessing you do some sort of reporting, and have access to a reporting db which is a copy of prod environment. If you lock it up only the reporting is temporarily disabled. But considering from a CB perspective we're all in prod giving users that much access would be a huge risk. The family options let them preset the options for a significantly reduced risk. Technically it's all possible, but not without opening a can of worms. PS, I do IT management and love clean data and metrics. I'd love to get direct access to thier DB and do some research. I figure they track model usage from the list building. I'm curious about some model usage and common skill combos.
I know some basic programing but not much more than writing scripts to automate stuff and working in command line, I'm not familiarizated with the Apps development and its challenges to be honest. If the preset option is a safer and easier option that would also be a big improvement but I'd like more the ability to customice my searchs... But would just adding the change from AND to OR be enough to lock up the table? With the actual filtering system you can select more than 1 option and it works fine (and the program would have to check for these in the database anyway), the change from AND to OR just would change the output but it shouldn't slow down the analysis.
Changing a single AND to an OR wouldn't do it. But stitching together multiple different queries will increase the time exponentially if its badly written. And if these queries are runs simultaneous on records that are being written to it can lock up. Virtually all enterprise systems keep a duplicate DB for running queries, with an automated systems that does a 1 way copy from the main DB to the reporting DB periodically. I've personally had to set up a reporting DB for a small company because we had a management user running reports on a DB that was running a call center. When some of his queries got too complex he would lock up the entire DB and shut down the call center until we had to forcibly cancel his query to the server.
If I may, I think a search option would be much easier to use than more filter options. If I can just type one or more keywords, and get all the profiles that match, it'd be much faster than clicking around the various menus. Mayanet already does this and I end up turning to it rather than Army specifically for this reason.