Dolt workbench onboarding UI confusion

[jon-mellon]

The first page you see here makes you think that you need to tick one of those two tick boxes.

I think some kind of indication that a valid option is to ignore those tick boxes and just enter the name would be helpful.

One good option would be to have three tick boxes with the top one being "connect to a local dolt/mysql server". You could have that option ticked by default and then show the relevant text entry boxes to pick depending on the selection of tickbox.

At the moment the UI is implicitly telling you that you need to choose one of those first two options when the modal case is leaving it unticked.

Finally, you're currently using checkboxes which typically imply multiple selection is possible. Radio buttons are a more standard UI choice for when only a single option is selectable at a time.

[jon-mellon]

One more thing on this screen. It's not at all clear how to give up and cancel adding a connection. There's no "back" or "cancel" option. The only way I've found to get back to the databases I've already added is to restart the app

[michi-zuri]

Thank you for opening this issue.
As a fresh user, I also found this first screen confusing. Here are my initial thoughts on this:

Three options instead of two

I would have preferred to have the choice between these options

• connect to a running dolt/mysql server (go directly to next step)
• spin up a builtin dolt server in workbench to get started quickly
• spin up a builtin dolt server in workbench with a clone from dolthub to get started with a specific database even faster.

For the first option (currently when no box is ticked), at first I couldn't think of what Name refers to – now I know it's the name of the connection that will be configured in the next step. I feel like the form fields Connection name and Connection type belong on the next tab where the connection is defined.

For the other two options, imho the name of the connection should not be configurable and should probably be named something like workbench or workbench-builtin-dolt-server.

Naming of the first tab

Also the name of the tab is confusing. Instead of the not very helpful About title for the first tab, I would have preferred Quick Start and being able to skip this step by clicking on the Connection tab and editing the name and type of the connection there.

Radio buttons instead of checkboxes

Having three radio buttons instead of two checkboxes would probably make more sense as well (checkboxes normally allow more than one to be selected).

Inconsistent restriction enforcement

The explanation text of the option Start a fresh Dolt server currently states:

Run a Dolt SQL server hosted directly within the Workbench. The app supports only one internal server instance, but this restriction does not apply to external Dolt server connections.

I don't understand why having two internal instances of dolt server is not supported, but with Clone a remote Dolt database from DoltHub it is possible to do just this: run several internal server instances... Is there really a need to restrict the number of internal servers? Apart from the port being in use (can be changed to use a different port) I couldn't see any problem with running dolt server three times using the option Clone a remote Dolt database from DoltHub on the Set up a new connection screen:

Connections screen (should probably a separate issue)

I think it would also be a nice addition to see the list of databases per connection on the Connections screen. The icon is that of a database, but it is only showing the name of the connection = server = cluster.

[tbantle22]

Thank you both for your feedback! It's on my roadmap to take another look at this page