Morpho XML Editor updates

[Matthew Brooke]

Hey Dan -

The revised editor looks great - I especially like the attributes 
representation.

I'd strongly vote for not having the additional "save" & "cancel" 
buttons, though, for the following reasons:

1) we're making users perform an extra (redundant) step that they 
wouldn't have to perform under similar circumstances in most other user 
interfaces - the "save" functionality could be performed by the editor 
without their having to hit a button.
(this also applies to those buttons below the spreadsheet in the main 
morpho data view that we were going to delete... :-)

2) It may be confusing for users, having "save", "cancel", "revert" and 
"finish" buttons all in the same area (this is the feedback we got with 
the original XUL wizard that Chris & I did, where we had "dialogs" 
nested inside the existing wizard frame - even though we grayed out the 
main wizard buttons).

3) I'm guessing the "save" & "cancel" buttons aren't shown in all 
editing panes - only in the ones imported from the wizard (is this 
true?). This may further confuse users - they have to hit "save" on some 
panels, but not on others.

4) If the user fills in some "attribute" data (in your screenshot) and 
*doesn't* hit "save", but clicks on other tree nodes and makes other 
edits, and finally clicks "finish", will the "attribute" changes never 
make it into the final DOM?

It seems both safer and less confusing to get rid of the "save" & 
"cancel" buttons, and "commit" the data based on change of focus - e.g. 
insert the data from the wizard panel into the DOM when the user clicks 
a different tree node and/or clicks "finish" - is this feasible?

Cheers

M



Dan Higgins wrote:

> Hi All,
>
>     A number of changes have been made to the Morpho XML Editor based 
> on discussions in our last set of review meetings. These are 
> summarized below and can be seen 'in action' by checking out the head 
> of the morpho CVS module. Comments appreciated.
>
> Dan Higgins
>
> -----
>
>
> Changes to the Morpho XML Editor
>
> 1. When a datapackage is first opened in the editor, only the elements 
> that actually exist in the document are displayed. This make the 
> display simpler and allows a user to more easily edit existing 
> information. (Previously, the existing instance was merged with the 
> complete eml scheme, showing ALL possible elements in the document).
>
> 2. Control buttons that were at the bottom of the tree/outline display 
> have been moved to the top. The top left button is labeled 'Show All'. 
> Clicking this button merges the existing tree with the schema template 
> and results in a 'complete' tree showing all possible elements.
>
> 3. A 'Find' control now appears at the top of the tree. A number of 
> subsection elements of common interest (e.g. keywordSet or 
> attributeList) appear in a comboBox and selecting a word in the list 
> 'finds' that word in the tree. The use can also just type any set of 
> characters and search for a node in the tree containing that sequence 
> of characters.
>
> 4. XML attributes now shown up in the tree as the first children of 
> the node where they appear in the XML document (A '=' icon is used for 
> these attribute nodes.)
>
> 5. EML2 has numerous 'references' elements in its schema which can be 
> used in place of various subtrees. Any unused 'references' are now 
> removed from the tree display (along with the associated CHOICE 
> elements). This makes the tree display much simpler and less 
> confusing. It does limit some editing possibilities that someone very 
> familiar with eml might be able to carry out.
>
> 6. Several of the panes used in the DataPackage Wizard now appear 
> directly as 'editors' on the right hand side of the XML editor when 
> the appropriate tree node is selected. These include the 'PartyPage', 
> the 'GeographicPage', the 'AttributePage' and the 'TemporalPage'.
>    Basically, wrapper classes, like 'AttributePanel', have been 
> created in the editor package which just use the displays created for 
> the Wizard. The XML editor uses a JTree. The subtree being edited is 
> converted to a DOM tree. This is then used to create an OrderedMap, 
> which is used to populate the various widgets in the wizard page being 
> displayed. 'Save' and 'Cancel' buttons have been added to the editor 
> panels for saving/resetting the displayed values. The Save button 
> takes the values from an output OrderedMap and merges this with the 
> same DOM tree used to populate the widgets. Note that this merge is 
> needed to preserve parts of the DOM that are not displayed in the 
> page. The DOM tree is then converted to a JTree and placed in the 
> complete tree shown on the left side of the overall editor.


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