Re: [lmi] tasks 2007: bug 105588, 105589 and 105590: supplemental-report

[Evgeniy Tarassov]

On 2/21/07, Greg Chicares <address@hidden> wrote:
> On 2007-2-16 12:24 UTC, Evgeniy Tarassov wrote:
> > -----------
> > Explain supplemental-report columns
> > http://savannah.nongnu.org/support/?105588
[...]
> dictates the solution: the annex should not be optional, and it
> should be part of the same single document generated by xsl-fo.

Thank you very much for the detailed explanation! I'm sorry for mixing
calculation summary and supplemental reports -- I'll pay more
attention to the terms.

> > -----------
> > Allow multiple supplemental reports
> > http://savannah.nongnu.org/support/?105589
> > -----------
> > Save and retrieve supplemental reports
> > http://savannah.nongnu.org/support/?105590
[...]
> As for the GUI, I haven't given it much thought...maybe we'd want
> to remove the current supplemental-report tab from the input
> wxNotebook, and replace it with a simple selection of any reports
> that the user has saved (or that we provided in the system
> distribution)--then move the current supplemental-report GUI into
> a new supplemental-report editor. (Or design a completely new GUI
> for that editor.)

Personally i like the way a similar feature is implemented in reget (a
download manager, a free version could be dowloaded from
http://www.reget.com/). In the previous mail i was trying to depict it
with ASCII graphics. The idea is to have the same UI widget which
gives access to already defined global user sets of columns and to let
the user specify a custom set of columns without no additional mess.
Of course it only make sense if user would frequently need to
customize a predefined column set for a particular document. Say, we
have a global saved named template (a set of columns). And a user
wants to get a report with an additional column, while he does not
want this column to be saved into the global template.
Let me detail on how column selection could be presented to the user:

|v|----Cash-Flow-|               |     |---------------|
                                |     | Supp Report 1 |
|-Supplemental-Report-Name-|     |     | Supp Report 2 |
 |save-set|  |delete-set|       |     | Supp Report 3 |
|v|---Supp-Report-Column-1-|    |>>|   | Supp Report 4 |
|v|---Supp-Report-Column-2-|     |     |               |
|v|---Supp-Report-Column-3-|     |     |---------------|
|v|---Supp-Report-Column-4-|     |        | remove |

On the left side:
|v|----Cash-Flow-|  -- a drop-down list of global (pre-defined) user
templates (column sets)
|-Supplemental-Report-Name-| -- text box containing a name of the
currently selected column set.
|save-set|  |delete-set|  -- two buttons. First one saves the selected
columns to the global persistent repository of templates. Second
button deletes a predefined set.
|v|---Supp-Report-Column-1-| -- A set of drop down list of columns.

|>>| -- a button to add the column set into the right listbox.

On the right side:
A listbox containing column sets selected for the current document.
The list is not persistent, it is not saved with the document -- it is
only used.
| remove | -- removes a selected column set (in the listbox) from the
list of supplemental reports.

Such a UI could be added to a preferences dialog to be able to edit
global templates for supplemental reports. In that dialog would only
have the left part (from UI above).

This approach is better than adding new fascility for editing
supplemental report templates via the menubar, because:
-- it has all the functionality for column selection and for template management
-- user can decide weither he is using a predefined template or
creates a custom one as late as possible -- exactly when he is on the
supplemental reports tab (the ui does not force him to think about it
before he is there).
-- UI is the same for global template editing and for a particular, so
that user has to learn only one type of UI.

BTW the same type of storing and using the set of settings exists in Windows XP:
"Control Panel" => "Display" => "Themes" tab
The drop down list allows to select a predefined theme.

[...]
> I'm not sure. What would the best GUI look like? Off the top of my
> head, I would think of using "File | New | Supplemental report"
> with corresponding "Load", "Save", and "Save as" options. That
> would take care of |save+set| above; for |delete+set|, we could
> just let users delete the file in whatever way is natural on their
> platform. IOW, why not just treat these templates as ordinary files?
> The system is kind of file-centric already, and the product editor
> makes it even more so; I see that as a Good Thing.

Oh, it is IMHO dangerous enough to ask a user to delete a file on a
file system. Plus it would expose the implementation details to a
user. Personally i would prefer to hide it all behind a UI so that a
user do not deletes by mistake anything important on the file system.

> A GUI for editing a supplemental-report file doesn't have to look
> exactly like what we've got today. In fact, better ideas could
> probably be devised: the present comboboxes are unwieldy. The
> problem arises often enough in various applications: choose some
> reorderable subset of a list of strings. Maybe we should figure
> out one really good way to do this, and make it part of wx; I'm
> sure others could use it.

AFAI remember on idea was to use two listboxes for that purpose. Like
in most of the web applications where a set of columns is being
selected.
For example: http://ebay.com/ => Books => Fiction => Customize Display
(http://search.ebay.com/ws/search/SearchCustomization?tab=customizedisplay&returnurl=http%3A%2F%2Flistings.ebay.com%2F_W0QQa23713Z23780QQalistZa23713QQfcoZ1QQgcsZ1128QQpfidZ1399QQreqtypeZ3QQsacatZQ2d100QQsocmdZListingItemList)
The page contains two listboxes and two buttons:

Available           Selected Columns
|----------|        |------------|
| Column 1 |  |>>|  | Selected 1 |
| Column 2 |         | Selected 2 |
| Column 3 |  |<<|   |            |
|----------|        |------------|

Or maybe even a standard listbox with checkbox-ed items would be good enough?