Morpho XML Editor updates

[Dan Higgins]

Matthew,

    I agree with most of your comments, except in 1) I would like to 
point out that this interface has exactly the same number of steps as 
the Wizard where there is a 'Save' and 'Cancel' button for each page. An 
advantage of repeating those buttons is that the panels in the editor 
are essentially identical with the pages in the Wizard.

    Nevertheless, having the 'in-line' Save & Cancel buttons is somewhat 
confusing. The standard nested text panels on the right of XML editor 
were written to use focus events to keep the tree up-to-date as 
information is edited (and the appropriate tree node is selected as one 
selects new panels). We should do the same thing with special editor 
panels like those taken from the Wizard, but there is NO EASY WAY TO DO 
THIS WITHOUT MAKING SUBSTANTIAL CHANGES TO THE WIZARD PANE CODE (OR THE 
EDITOR). In other words, the existing editor panels were put together 
with the goal of minimizing changes in either the Wizard code or the XML 
editor code. Thus the Save button is needed to save any changes in the 
Wizard pages displayed in the editor (just reusing code from the Wizard).

    Note that the problem is that the XML editor can display multiple 
pages - e.g. if one selects the the attributeList in the tree, a whole 
series of attribute pages will appear on the right side of the screen. 
One could then move from one page to another and never save the edits 
(because no events are triggered) until a whole lot of changes have been 
made. And the tree would not get updated while all these changes were 
being made. Maybe we could figure out how to do this without changing 
the wizard page code, but it would seem to require a lot of changes in 
the XML editor.

    Otherwise, we would need to revise all the widgets used in the 
Wizard to handle/generate events. For textboxes, this might mean simply 
handling focus gained/lost events, but it would be more complicated 
figuring how to deal with other widgets like the radio buttons used to 
change subpanels in the AttributePage.

    Frankly, I am very hesitant to start making the changes needed to 
avoid the Save/Cancel buttons prior to the planned 1.5 release in April. 
We still haven't completely frozen the code base and started seriously 
working on bug elimination and performace enhancements. It seems to me 
that substantaial code changes are needed to handle the wizard pages 
without the Save/Cancel buttons. And I am worried that we are running 
out of time! (So my real concern is priority of such changes.)

Dan


--------------

Matthew Brooke wrote:

>
> 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                                  higgins at nceas.ucsb.edu
http://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/    Ph: 805-892-2531
National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) 
735 State Street - Room 205
Santa Barbara, CA 93195
*******************************************************************

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