Re: GUI questions

[John Darrington]

On Tue, Oct 02, 2007 at 11:02:15PM -0700, Ben Pfaff wrote:
     Clearly that works.  The bit about it that worries me is whether
     it will be obvious to a user that OK and Paste are insensitive
     *because* no variables have yet been selected.  In the case where
     no variables at all exist, it seems like it's an even larger leap
     of logic: from "Hmm, there are two empty boxes with an arrow
     between them" to "I must need to define some variables so that I
     can some variables appear in the leftmost box for me to move to
     the rightmost box".
     
     From this point of view it might actually be friendlier to pop up
     a message box "You need to define add some numeric variables to
     your data set before you can compute descriptive statistics." in
     this case, since it tells the user what's wrong and how to fix
     it, instead of just giving them a couple of empty boxes and
     possible mystification.
     
     Is there a solution that has the advantages of each approach?

One approach which occurs to me, is to hack
attach_dictionary_to_treeview, so that if when there are no valid
variables, the treeview's background displays some terse string like
"No variables in dataset".  The tooltip for the treeview could then
display some longer more verbose string.

J'

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