RadPivotGrid Aggregate Sort

Adam

Posted on: 24 Oct 2017 12:20

@Marin - it doesn't seem to page SQL out of the box (based on observations in SQL Profiler). It seems to instead pull ALL the data from SQL into memory and then page it there. Extremely inefficient. Anyway this is a discussion for a separate thread.

On this Aggregate Sort feature, I think you are missing the point. I have received the following notifications from Telerik:

25/04/2016 - Status = Approved. Scheduled for R3 2016
26/09/2016 - Follow up message from query on above to confirm pushed back to R1 2017 but possibly in upcoming R3 2016 SP1
26/09/2016 - Status = In Development. Scheduled for R1 2017
31/01/2017 - Status = In Development. Not scheduled.
04/10/2017 - Status = Approved. Scheduled for R1 2017
11/10/2017 - Status = Declined.

What the hell kind of Roadmap is that to provide your customers?

The point is that you may have only 1 user (me) equalling 1 vote in your system, but that vote is from a developer, not from end users. I have 1000s of users who are all requesting this across 25 clients. I have passed on scheduling of feature availability based on your notifications above to my 15 client stakeholders and their 1000s of users. But your scheduling / status messages have been completely incorrect.

We've been continually postponing feature availability on this for over 18 months now.
We've lost one client, who admittedly had more than one issue, however, two main issues were around RadGrid / RadPivot - inability to sort aggregates, inability to export large datasets. Loss of this client costs us £50,000 per year...

So the point is... do not tell your "users" (developers) STATUS = APPROVED / STATUS = IN DEVELOPMENT if that is not the case! You have no idea what havoc you are causing downstream of that announcement and this is not a good way to look after your customers as we are the one who embarrassingly need to tell the real users (end-users) why their common sense feature is taking a year and a half to release when we told them 3-6 months.

Had I known 18 months ago that we would wait this long and not receive this feature, I could have ripped out Telerik from my solution and replaced it for less than the cost of the client lost off the back of this situation.

Please consider your customers better when announcing feature statuses and scheduling. Remember that your customers are not always the end-users and that your voting system really doesn't reflect the end-user weighting of each vote.

ADMIN

Marin Bratanov

Posted on: 24 Oct 2017 09:56

Hi all, and thank you for your feedback.

The truth is that, indeed, there is little demand for the pivot grid control. The UI for ASP.NET AJAX suite is predominantly a set of user interface controls, and data analytics falls a bit out of its scope. Thus, we must push hard in areas that provide benefit to (and are requested by) the majority of our customers - people building UI with our controls. And, at the moment, this focus must be on accessibility, modern browser support and security. Thus, a highly complex feature for a not very popular control cannot make the cut because it will provide a niche benefit while preventing us from working on other important tasks.

@sthoughton - there are items with more votes, and they have already been handled in one way or the other. Also, the "Approved" status means that we believe there is some value in the idea with the goal to encourage discussion and voting. Here are more explanations on this: https://www.telerik.com/forums/is-asp-net-ajax-being-phased-out#-VDRYjalqkqqMWS95y_dgQ

I must also note that there is also another factor that contributes to the relatively low number of votes - the suite contains 100+ controls with a lot of features and API, and they suffice for the majority of our customers. Also, there are other channels our management uses to gather feedback from our customers (interviews being one, surveys being one other, the ticketing system and forums being a third and fourth) that allow us to keep in line with the demands of our community. The clean-up of this public backlog is a concentrated effort that takes into account all the information we have, not only the apparent votes.

@cymbio - we are looking into improving the forums and we are considering options. I will pass your idea to the team working on this. On paging with an SqlDataSource - RadGrid does that out of the box - it pulls the data according to the Select statement privided by the developer and then splits it into pages according to the AllowPaging and PageSize properties. On the large export - this is a memory intensive operation and can cause such behavior: https://docs.telerik.com/devtools/aspnet-ajax/controls/grid/functionality/exporting/overview#export-large-amount-of-data . What I can suggest you look into is generating the file from the database without RadGrid with a tool like RadSpreadStreamProcessing instead: https://docs.telerik.com/devtools/document-processing/libraries/radspreadstreamprocessing/overview

@kmoran - while the feature makes great sense for a pivot grid, and it will likely be needed by its users, the fact remains that this control does not have wide adoption and this feature will cater to highly specific use cases that do not benefit the majority of our customers.

Keith

Posted on: 19 Oct 2017 09:32

I just wish to echo previous posters' sentiments. Most end users I have got feedback from ask the question- how do I sort the aggregate data? It just seems like such an obvious feature. It has potential to be a great data analysis tool. There is no way only 25 developers want it.

Shane

Posted on: 19 Oct 2017 03:29

"during this long time period this feature has only been requested a total of 25 times (compared to younger features with much higher vote counts)."

I think that many users/developers have become disenfranchised with this process and that the number of votes through this feedback channel/forum are artificially low. For example, the most popular item in this forum, from those in "all not done" status, has 28 votes!

All too often, great ideas linger in approved status for forever with no further feedback from Telerik. Many users see these items in "approved" status and assume that the item has been approved for development. They don't feel the need to upvote something that has already been approved. 

In fact, I have seen items that were in approved status AND had a release defined in the "scheduled for:" field. Then, out of nowhere, the item is declined with no explanation or some canned response like "This feature has high complexity while its impact is relatively small." 

You can't begin to understand how frustrating this is! And it's not just restricted to the ASP.NET AJAX portal - I've seen the same issues in all of the Telerik product feedback forums. It makes it difficult to justify the use of Telerik products when there is not a clear and consistent roadmap for any of the products.

Adam

Posted on: 16 Oct 2017 08:26

Oh and 4) RadGrid export to Excel/CSV fails on any grid around 10k rows. This functionality is essential and works much better in Infragistics or many other products.

Adam

Posted on: 16 Oct 2017 08:25

Marin,

See your point of view, but have you considered that you get very little feedback on PivotGrid because it is an utterly poor control? Not only does aggregate sort not work out of the box, but neither does data drilldown (without following a blog post on the matter).

I also am a 3+ year customer of Telerik and will be moving on due to:
1) Lack of support for PivotGrid
2) RadGrid in general - should support DB paging out of the box using simple SqlDataSource
3) Your forums - are awful. Most searches on Google return forum pages from 2009 with information that is no longer relevant or correct. You need to cleanse these pages. My developers get very confused by them. You'd be better off ditching/archiving everything pre-2012 as this is a very poor reflection on your product.

ADMIN

Marin Bratanov

Posted on: 13 Oct 2017 14:51

Hi everyone,

I understand your sentiments and I agree that this feature can have its benefits in particular scenarios with the PivotGrid. However, the main reason for this feature being declined now, four years after the initial request, is that during this long time period this feature has only been requested a total of 25 times (compared to younger features with much higher vote counts).

The reason why such requests may linger for a long time is that we do try to give them time to gain traction in the community. We try to point anyone that requests this feature through another channel (email, support, other forums) to this request to ensure that we can track the popularity of the feature. At some point, to ensure that we can serve the our community with an up-to-date feedback portal we have to provide a more final answer.

To give you further insight: while powerful and a component we have spent a lot of time on, the truth is that the PivotGrid control is one of the components that we receive the least amount of feedback for. Implementing this feature today will mean that we will not implement something that has a much bigger impact for everyone working with UI for ASP.NET Ajax, like accessibility improvements, bug fixes for the latest browsers, security improvements, which affect all our customers across the board. Ultimately, we have to make tough decisions in order to provide the greatest benefit to our customers as a whole.

I hope this explains the situation from our point of view. I know that this is disappointing to the people that have voted for and commented on this feature but rather than leave this alone I wanted to provide some additional insights for everyone. If this affects you on a severe level I would encourage you to submit a support ticket and we can continue a discussion around this particular feature in a medium that is a bit easier for back-and-forth communication.

Robert

Posted on: 11 Oct 2017 19:37

I'm sure losing more customers is also 'of small impact', so why bother working to make your products better.

Robert

Posted on: 11 Oct 2017 19:33

As have we. I am looking currently to replacing their grid and when I do, I will cancel my entire license.

I have been a customer for 5 years and have given a lot of experiential feedback on how to improve the Grid and PivotGrid, but it has totally fallen on deaf ears largely with the complaint that 'it's too hard' or 'it would require a lot of work'. Seems all Telerik wants is low hanging fruit. Well guess what guys !? Since that is all you did was low hanging fruit, you are easily replaced by the likes of vendors like Webix, jqWidgets, DevExpress and many others, some 100% open source. But, i'm sure the founders cashed out of this place when they sold to Progress.

andysuss

Posted on: 11 Oct 2017 18:58

Terry is one hundred percent correct, i have long ago given up on this one control.

DevExpress works just fine.

Telerik, you guys blew this one big time, and it cost you my business.

Imported User

Posted on: 11 Oct 2017 18:49

Marin, after 3 years of nothing regarding an absolutely essential feature for anyone trying to do data analytics (why would anyone want a pivot grid that can't be sorted by aggregates?), I'm sure most of your users have moved on to another solution as have we.

ADMIN

Marin Bratanov

Posted on: 11 Oct 2017 08:19

This feature has high complexity and may cause regressions, while its impact is relatively small. Thus, it will not be implemented.

Daniel

Posted on: 31 Jan 2017 21:52

I agree as well - please implement the feature!!

Adam

Posted on: 25 Apr 2016 08:51

I think this is a crucial feature. We've just put a lot of effort into converting an excel driven process to a web application driven process for our customer. After all this effort we just discovered that sorting is not possible on these fields. This is a very important part of our client's process and we are now told that this application is not fit for purpose. I made the big mistake of assuming it would be available as it is such an integral part of working with pivot data. I notice that this feature is available in your Silverlight product... why then is it not available in the ASP.NET for Ajax product? Surely your components should behave the same across architectures?

Alberto

Posted on: 09 Nov 2015 12:07

This is really an important and missing feature. We use the pivot grid in Excel extensively.  While moving our applications and reports to the web, it is imperative that the pivot grid sort by aggregates.  You would think this would be a fairly simple task. Please implement if possible in the very near future!

Robert

Posted on: 04 Aug 2015 14:31

All of you guys need to hop over and support my contention/request that Grid Grouping needs this feature as well,,,currently, with Grouping, you cannot sort Grouped items by another columns aggregates.

Please help support this request as well.

Tomas

Posted on: 06 May 2015 20:50

It is important feature!

Bob

Posted on: 18 Sep 2014 14:11

We use the pivot grid in Excel extensively.  While moving our applications and reports to the web, it is imperative that the pivot grid sort by aggregates.  You would think this would be a fairly simple task.  Please add this in the very near future!

andysuss

Posted on: 01 Mar 2014 13:57

Cant implement this tool without this functionality...... Please address !

Yohan

Posted on: 12 Jan 2014 07:05

+1 we need this feature as its really valuable when there is a huge data set.

Gaurab

Posted on: 10 Dec 2013 17:10

Agree.  We are competing with Excel and SharePoint.  They have this feature.  Please help us out here!

Jan

Posted on: 12 Nov 2013 10:06

This is really an important and missing feature. Pareto, best/worst performing items, all depending on this. Please implement if possible.

Eli

Posted on: 23 Oct 2013 16:59

In our case we use it for a Help Desk ticketing system to show summary information.  It is natural to want to see the top ticket producers based around whatever analysis you want, not alphabetical.

Erik

Posted on: 23 Oct 2013 16:51

Totally agree -- if you're doing a pareto-like analysis (where you want to see top producers, or offenders, or whatever) this is critical functionality.  Please consider this feature.