Re: GUI questions

[John Darrington]

On Tue, Oct 02, 2007 at 07:21:16AM -0700, Ben Pfaff wrote:

     >      examples, procedures can't run without any data, so should we
     >      gray out the Analyze menu until there's data?  
     >
     > I think not.  Procedures can run without data, although in most cases
     > they will give trivial (and perhaps meaningless) answers.
     
     How about if there are no variables?

I'm not sure if there are any procedures which can run with no
variables (perhaps EXECUTE can?).  In most cases it won't make any
sense to run a procedure without variables.   In these cases if, as
discussed previously, OK and Paste are insensitive until a variable is
selected, then it'll not be possible to run such a procedure using the
GUI.

     > If a procedure requires only numeric variables (or variables
     > satisfying any other predicate), then you can enforce that by only
     > displaying the appropriate variables in the treeview (use the last
     > argument of attach_dictionary_to_treeview).  See the weight cases
     > dialog for an example of this.
     
     I did that.  But I was thinking of the case where there are no
     numeric variables at all in the active file dictionary.  Does the
     answer change in that case?

I don't think so.  In this case, the source GtkTreeView will be
empty. Thus no variables can be selected. 

In summary, I think there are two questions you're asking:

1.  Should the OK and Paste buttons be insensitive until the dialog is
    in a state from which is possible to run a valid procedure?

2.  Should the menuitem to which a dialog is attached be insensitive
    until there are variables defined.


I think the answer to 1 is Yes.  The answer to 2 is Maybe; I can see
an argument against doing that; It's useful for users to browse a gui
to see what features will available once they've defined some
variables and data.

J'
     

-- 
PGP Public key ID: 1024D/2DE827B3 
fingerprint = 8797 A26D 0854 2EAB 0285  A290 8A67 719C 2DE8 27B3
See http://pgp.mit.edu or any PGP keyserver for public key.

signature.asc
Description: Digital signature