[Design] New Sidebar problems

[Bryan Stearns]

Hi John,

I did a little thinking about the sidebar issues you set out below 
(admittedly, quite a bit less thinking than I'm sure you've done!), and 
I had two ideas... I don't think there's anything about the design that 
requires that there be two separate widgets involved in separating the 
groups of collections; in fact, I think the complexity comes from trying 
to hide that there are two widgets in the first place.... this got me 
thinking about alternative ways of representing the separation.

My first (wrongheaded) idea was that we could put a "sentinel" item in 
the sidebar collection collection, and index the collection in a way 
that would force the OOTB collections first, the sentinel next, then the 
user collections in alphabetical order. We'd use some wacky attribute 
editor (or maybe a raw editor & renderer) to handle drawing of the 
separator-line cell.

I quickly realized how wrong this was -- having the UI affect the model 
all the way down to the collection level -- but it gave me a better idea:

What if we adapted Alec's sectioning code, and implement the separator 
line the way we handle sections in the Summary table? This might make it 
easier to deal with focus and selection more consistently (since it'd 
all be handleable within a single wxTable widget)...

(I know, this is a 'dev'-list answer to a 'design'-list question... sorry.)

...Bryan

John Anderson wrote:
> Hi:
>
> As I mentioned to Philippe, after nearly three weeks working on the 
> new sidebar, it's still not finished and it's raised a number of 
> sticky issues, which makes me wonder if it's the right approach.
>
> I was hoping to get a "somewhat" functional demo for people to play 
> with to spark some debate, however, getting a version that doesn't 
> seem totally broken is taking longer than I thought.
>
> So, let me start by posing one of the problems to at least start the 
> debate.
>
> The new sidebar has is made up of two separate sidebars, one for the 
> "out of the box" collections, another for the "user" collections. This 
> means there are two separate sidebar selections. When you're 
> displaying the "out of the box" collections in the summary view, 
> you're limited to only collections in the "out of the box" sidebar. 
> Likewise for the "user" sidebar.
>
> One problem is caused by an ambiguity of whether or not a 
> command/operation refers to selected items in both sidebars, the "out 
> of the box" sidebar, or the "user sidebar".
>
> When the sidebar has the focus, it seems like you probably want to 
> consider the focused sidebar only. However when neither sidebar has 
> the focus, should you consider both sidebars together, or perhaps the 
> last one that had focus. If neither sidebar has focus, but only one is 
> "active" then we'd probably have to draw it differently otherwise you 
> couldn't tell which one the command would operate on. This might lead 
> to some confusion. It's breaking the simple, and universal notion, of 
> a single "active selection" -- it's like we have more than one "active 
> selection": the one where typing goes and the one when some other 
> command affecting the sidebar go.
>
> As an exercise to help sort this out,  go through them menus and ask 
> yourself the question: what should each command do given the various 
> combinations of focus and selections in both sidebars?
>
> John
>
>
>
>
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