This is nice because: I can add a new item, and once an item is selected, I can easily add purchases/sells for this item.
But it is not very userfriendly, as the way to select an already existing item with the small arrows does not work when there are thousands of items (which is my case).
I thought about adding a table widget in the same page, and make the card depend on the table selection, but in this case I lost the “+” icon to add a new item (and a table with thousands of entries would not make it that much easier to select the item one want to work on).
I thought about creating a custom widget with some autocomplete field, and make the card depend on it, but same story.
In my dreamed world, I’d thinking to have in the card widget an autocomplete field, which would act just as the two arrows, but would be much more powerful and user friendly.
But maybe I’m missing the point and there is a better pattern to achieve this!
Second try (still without being able to also add products from here): I’ve added a “State” table, and added one row on it, and disabled the create on it, and then added a compact card:
UX is much better like this. But needing to switch to another page to add a product and then switch again to add purchase/sells for it is still not very user friendly.
The collapsed widget on the top has the list of Contacts. You can click it and select an existing contact. To add a new one, you still have to click it, and then I usually either use a keyboard shortcut to insert a new row, or the row context menu.
It’s definitely still clunky, but it feels somewhat close. In particular, one thought (similar to your idea of replacing arrow keys with a dropdown) is to allow the “CONTACTS” button on top to itself be a dropdown, and have it also allow adding a new record (as a button or a dropdown option).
