[Design][cosmo][last call][Bug 7633] Moving event lozenge on calendar canvas mid-edit loses edits in detail view

[Matthew Eernisse]

Mimi,

There are both technical and design-philosophy reasons that would make 
implementing something like that potentially problematic in a Web UI. At 
this point, I lean very heavily toward not wanting to go that route.

That question gets us into the autosave can of worms (opened by the idea 
of implementing edit-in-place on the lozenge) that I alluded to in the 
last e-mail. I'll write up a detailed post which attempts to describe 
what I see as the issues, and the potential solutions and their 
benefits/drawbacks.

Thanks.


Matthew

Mimi Yin wrote:
> This is great Matthew. I'm wondering if we can push this even further. 
> Is there a technical reason we can't try and 'do the right thing' and 
> commit changes to the server whenever users do something that would make 
> the detail view either disappear or change to display the details of a 
> different item? This would basically mean:
> + Clicking on a different item in the summary pane
> + Switching collections in the collection pulldown
> + Logging out
> + Leaving the Hub UI altogether
> + Closing the browser window
> 
> Mimi
> 
> On May 2, 2007, at 12:08 PM, Matthew Eernisse wrote:
> 
>> After some further thought -- and a bunch of chitchat with Jeremy 
>> Epstein that was really helpful -- I see that there's a better 
>> solution to the first of the two scenarios that doesn't involve 
>> throwing up a dialog at all.
>>
>> The two scenarios are:
>>
>> 1. Users click on the lozenge for the same event they are editing in 
>> the item detail form
>>
>> A dialog box is actually not needed here, because the user's intent is 
>> clear.
>>
>> The UI should just do the right thing in that case, and apply edits 
>> from the form along with the changes to start and end time caused by 
>> moving/resizing the lozenge. (If the changes in the form include a 
>> change to start/end, then the move/resize changes would overwrite them.)
>>
>> 2. Users click on the lozenge for a different event.
>>
>> Here we still need the dialog to ask users if they want to apply 
>> changes, discard changes, or cancel the change of selection to the new 
>> event.
>>
>> This seems to me like a fairly obvious improvement in the case of 
>> number 1, so unless there are some objections, I'll take this tack 
>> when doing the fix for this bug.
>>
>> On a related note, in talking about this with both Priscilla (and 
>> later Jeremy as well), some interesting questions came up regarding 
>> the behavior of saving changes to items in the Chandler Server Web UI. 
>> This can of worms was opened up by the question of how to implement 
>> edit-in-place for the event title directly on the lozenge. (There's an 
>> open bug, no. 7849, for this.)
>>
>> I'll address that stuff in a separate e-mail to the list.
>>
>>
>> Matthew.
>>
>>
>> Matthew Eernisse wrote:
>>> I agree that 'Discard' is better. I'd also like to propose a change 
>>> to the prompt that makes it clearer why the dialog has popped up. I 
>>> propose the following:
>>> You have made changes to the currently selected item. Do you want to 
>>> save your changes?
>>> [Cancel]    [Discard] [Save]
>>> I do kind of like the addition of the word 'Changes' in the two 
>>> right-hand buttons. (And I'm usually a fan of one-word button labels.)
>>> It makes it totally clear what the choices are, even if the user 
>>> doesn't really bother to read the prompt. It also underlines more 
>>> clearly the difference between discarding the changes and proceeding, 
>>> and canceling and going back to the state you were in before.
>>> I do however think the button labels are perfectly usable as-is.
>>> Matthew
>>> Priscilla Chung wrote:
>>>> Last call…? -Priscilla
>>>>
>>>> On Apr 24, 2007, at 12:37 PM, Priscilla Chung wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> If people don't feel strongly about the proposed buttons, then 
>>>>> let's finalize a decision on this proposal. ---
>>>>> Save changes?
>>>>>
>>>>> [Cancel]     [Discard] [Save]
>>>>
>>>>
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>>>>
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