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It is not a license issue.

Datalists have not been migrated from 9 to 10 as we have decided to not move it unless it was very much needed. The module it self has a number of issues in the context of DW10, so a complete migration would never be used.

The version for DW10 is in the login screen or if you hover over your username in the user menu in the lower left of the backend UI:

Can you elaborate on what you need data lists for? Items and an item publisher or query publisher is a better way to go. Also you can use a SQL index builder and a query publisher to index and publish data from random tables.

Hi Nicolai,

Thank you:

• I can now find the version
• We will try to use the Query Publisher (again).
• Regaring what we use Data Lists for, we use it in multiple ways - continue below

My Order customizations

• We frequently get asked to add specific filters, columns and sorting the Customer Experience Center does not support
• In the past we used Query Publisher but ran into some issues
  • Customers complained they could not see the order immediately after it's been placed
  • We used the SqlIndexBuilder
    • And at least as far as I know we cannot do partial build with it
    • Maybe it's just a second build, but we'd need to trigger a notification (i.e. OrderComplete) to run it
    • When importing orders/ledgers, we'd have to trigger the rebuild as well
  • It also started to take a very long time as months went by
    • Ecom Orders and Ecom Orderlines tend to grow since they have Carts, Quotes, Ledgers and Recurring Orders

Custom tables and developments

• In some projects we do have some tabular data.
• Unlike Product lists and searches, it's only triggered/requested every now and then (usually behind a login and/or with some Request variables
• We also use it because of the flexibility of choosing which columns are rendered in the list vs detail page

We have a big project going on, where we have more than 30 Data Lists to support all of their needs. Desite being an outlier, it allowed our team to plan for multiple scenarios without the need for a Developer for 90% of the work.

Quick validations and support

• We create some Data Lists to help us (and our customers sometimes) to peek into the data
• The flexibility to type up a (complex SQL) Query that our customers can simply click and/or change test values is great
• The new Index browser can likely replace this

Using Query Publisher moving forward

• I'm not opposed
• It has a number of PROS
  • Great performance
  • Less DB intensive
  • Handles Pagination
  • Handles Filtering on any property
  • Handles sorting on any property
  • It prevents fat-fingering in the SQL Query of the Data list when adding new columns/search criteria
• From my perspective, the CONS are
  • Adding or Removing columns requires a developer
  • We need to plan for rebuilds
    • Can/Should we do partials?
    • Do we have notifications to support it?
    • Did we forget to rebuild the index after an integration job? - that's why the customer doesn't see it and we do when go there (scheduled rebuild kicked in since then)
  • There's a lot more steps to get something working than Data Lists
  • And (not compared to Data List, but with tools like Elastic Search) creating Facets and Free Text Search settings is a bit nerdy
    • DW9's Search for Editors UI make it look much easier
    • A wizard to set up the facet (create a custom field + query parameter + expression in a dedicated group + facet) would be great
      • But then we could update the settings accordingly
    • A wizard to set up free text search
      • Some redefined values for boosting
      • Picking which fields to look for

Does this help? Happy to discuss more. 

BR

Nuno Aguiar

Hi guys,

I can totally relate to Nuno's use cases. We usually tend to use DataLists for pretty much the same scenarios.

And I also agree with Nuno's comments on the UI for handling Facets and Queries.

If you guys decide to take this discussion further, I would be very happy to get involved.

Thank you,

Adrian