Re: gEDA-user: [Patches] GTK Recent-file-manager

[Matthew Wilkins <matthew_m_wilkins@xxxxxxxx>]

>Excellent!

>I'd be interested to know how you're tackling the user interface (and
>editing behaviour) with multiple objects selected.

>There are various cases:

>1. Attribute exists in all objects, same value
>2. Attribute exists in all objects, different values
>3. Attribute does NOT exist in all objects. (Same value in those which it does)
>4. Attribute does NOT exist in all objects. (Different values in those which it 
>does)



Right; so as it is, my version of the multi-attribute editor shows one row for 
each attribute name that occurs in any of the selected symbols.  Just like 
before, inherited attributes get a separate line from attached attributes, and 
they're displayed in a lighter text style and are not editable.

If there are multiple values existing for the same attribute, the dialog shows 
'*** Varies ***' in that row.  There is no indication if the attribute doesn't 
exist in all selected symbols; since inherited attributes are already displayed 
in a different text style, I think adding a third text style will be too 
confusing.

When editing an attribute that is not present on all selected attributes, I plan 
to show a dialog box warning that some symbols are missing the attribute.  Check 
a box to add the missing attributes, OK to proceed, Cancel to cancel the 
operation altogether. That's one of the details left to finish up.


>When we have multiple same-named attributes in a symbol, there might be
>more than one possibly way to classify existing attributes by the above
>scheme.

>I seem to recall multiple similarly named attributes were a potential
>pain in the backside for editing, as you need to preserve the idea /
>mapping of which specific attribute from which symbols correspond to a
>particular row in the editing box.



To be honest, I hadn't thought much about the case of having multiple same-named 
attributes in the same symbol.  I my current implementation, editing the value 
of that attribute would set the value for all occurrences of the attribute.  The 
attributes could still be edited individually using the single attribute editor. 
 What are typical use cases for having multiple same-named attributes in a 
symbol?


>For the "different values" cases, I would imagine (say), showing the
>value in grey as "[Various]", or some other place-holder. (Perhaps even
>providing a drop-down list of existing values?).

I think it's a great idea to have a combo box to select from the current 
values... the complication is that the cell renderer for the value column is a 
custom class.  We'll need a new custom class in order to change it to a combo 
box.  I think I'd save this for a later update.   I have added a combo box to 
the name column, so you you can choose attribute names there from the same list 
as in the Add Attribute portion of the dialog.


While I was at it, I added a help button to the dialog, which brings up the 
'Master Attributes List' of the wiki with definitions of all the typical 
attribute names.

Once I get a few details sorted out, I think it'll be good to let people play 
with it a bit and see if it does what they want/expect.  It's definitely easy to 
do something very wrong if you're not careful, but the undo feature is good for 
that.  I was playing with it in conjunction with a little scheme script to do a 
search-select, i.e. (search "device" "RESISTOR"), and then edit the footprint 
for all resistors in the schematic at once; seemed to work great.




_______________________________________________
geda-user mailing list
geda-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user