Notes about new Horse Table/list

[The Admin]

The old SIM loaded up to 500 horses per SIM page of horses. If you had more than 500, you would have to click the "Next" link to load the next 500. Any sorting you did on the table only sorted within the 500 that were displayed. That was always kind of lame. It wasn't a real sort.

The new SIM tables are set to load up to 5000 horses at a time, but only display 100 of them at a time. The sorting and new "quick filter" works on the entire set of 5000. This virtually eliminated the old paging links and put the paging inside the table itself.

All of these numbers are arbitrary and meant to balance usability and speed. 500 was a random number we chose before. We raised that to 5000 for the number loaded. We reduced the viewable number to 100 with the assumption that you would rarely scroll through more than 100 horses. You would use the filter methods to reduce the list before you actually scrolled through the list.

Why was 500 a perfect random number? Why not 1000 or 250? How do we select the perfect number? Did we just get used to 500?

If we load and display 5000, it will slow down the page loads.

PS - we are only 48 hours into the new design. We can make adjustments. But we need to collect data to make informed changes rather than reactive changes. Thanks for your (constructive) input and patience.

[Ali Hedgestone]

Thank you for posting a bit about the history and the thought that went into the new design.
The limit of 100 horses affected me because of the size of my barn. The quick filter is super helpful and useable when I want to sort through horses, for example find all the horses that ran on a certain day. In that instance, having the table display only 100 horses, doesn't affect the useability as I rarely have more than 100 horses that ran on the same day.

Where I ran into trouble is with scheduling mass exercises. Right now I have 233 horses in my training barn. If I want to lunge or walk them all, I have to select the 100 horses on the first page, complete the action go back to the barn, select the next rinse and repeat for the next 2 pages. Last year I have 430 some odd yearlings in training. Even if I limit it to one breed, I still have 115 TB yearlings this year. So I schedule the first 100, then have to go back to do the same action with the next 100. This is where the arbitrary 500 horse number came in handy, I was never over 500 of anything I wanted to perform a mass action on. I don't know how some of the others who are over 500 feel.

Overall, I'm ok with only seeing 100 horses per page in the barns or having the number raised. The dilemma of what number is just right I am sure is a issue. The number for me this year is 250. But last year that would not have been might enough. What would be nice would be to be able to mass select the ones that meet the filtered criteria (quick filter or non) and do a action with them all, if it's only set to 100 horses.

And I just saw that the number of horses on the page was raised. You are the best.

[Alleyne Torres]

Why was 500 a perfect random number? Why not 1000 or 250? How do we select the perfect number? Did we just get used to 500?

It seems many of the updates in the last few SIM years have been geared toward making it more feasible to manage a large barn, so it was certainly odd to go backward in that area.

[Lori Hamill]

I have almost 1500 horses in my barn - don't know if that is considered large or not. I know there are others with many more. I'm not having any problem with the 100 count. I don't think I ever scrolled through 500 horses at a time with the old format. I always was reducing the amount by filtering either by gender, or distance, or type or age or breed - many times with a combination such as "2 year old turf router fillies" - even when exercising I usually broke them into groups.

This is what works for me, everyone has their own way of doing things. The methods I use will work for me regardless of what the limit is, 100 or 500 or 5000.