ERPNext Awesome Bar

Few months back, a very insistent user said that he cannot use ERPNext because it does not have a global search. Too bad, I told myself. Global search is a hard problem and very few products have it. To implement global search, one first has to create a keyword index of all the records from all the 150 odd tables and then keep maintaining and updating it. I filed away the thought for a future time.

Last week, while I was sweating away on the treadmill, it finally dawned that we need to start working on the GitHub Issue List. While I was labeling all the tasks, universal search came right back into the spotlight. In the last few months, we have been using GitHub extensively and I am always surprised with the speed and quality with which they release new features the have a pretty good Search too. So I decided right away, that we can release something quick.

Instead of building indexes, I constrained my self in terms of what I could do in a short time. In our system system, we have a "boot" process in which we load basic permission data about the user. So using this data, we were able to make a very useful Awesome Bar. Here are some things it can do.

1. Create New Records

2. Do Quick Calculations

3. Jump to List Page

4. Search

There are some feature delight even the ones who have made them and the Awesome Bar is one such feature. We love using it and it has helped us solve a problem we did not anticipate. Navigation. ERPNext is a complex product and navigating from one part to another takes a few clicks. Now with the awesome bar, we can do it much more faster.

If you have more ideas in what the awesome bar can do, post them here.

Checkout the Awesome Bar in the Demo