Re: [lmi] *.db4 GUI editor description

[Vadim Zeitlin]

On Fri, 29 Jul 2005 16:09:43 -0400 "Boutin, Wendy" <address@hidden> wrote:

BW> This posting describes the GUI editor for a *.db4 file, which 
BW> is the most complex one of the five.

 Indeed, it looks quite sufficiently complex to me for now. I think I
understand how the dialog currently works, thanks for your explanations!
However I still lack the global understanding needed to know what would be
the best way to make it work in the new version.

 First of all, it can, of course, be left as it is with only minor
improvements (e.g. it should really be resizeable as otherwise it can be
quite inconvenient). But I guess the goal is to improve on the existing
display, isn't it?

 To be honest I'm not sure if the treelist control I had mentioned before
is really the best approach here because the information is really tabular
and not flat/list-like. If all the cells in the grid are really used, then
I think the grid should stay and any possible non trivial improvements
could only concern the choice of the columns and rows displayed in it. OTOH
if only some coordinates (i.e. tuples of values of different axis) are
usually used, then a treelist idea could be workable. Forgetting about the
tree component, we'd have a list with one column per axis (allowing to hide
the unused ones) plus one for the actual value.

 The advantage of this approach is that all the data would actually be in a
single control and so should be easier to manipulate. The limitation is
that it wouldn't clearly show the values for all possible coordinates (but
then this is not the case right now neither as soon as you use more than 2
axis).

 Do you think it would be interesting to try to do something like this? Or
maybe there is an even better approach for visualizing and editing (which
might use different controls BTW...) this data?

 Thanks for your thoughts,
VZ