Re: Category design issues

[Miguel de Icaza <miguel nuclecu unam mx>]

[ 
  Note: We are planning on replacing gnomecard with GABY now, 
  it looks to me like the best thing to do at this point 
]

> First, I've looked at the category support which was added to 
> Gnomecard, but, IMHO, it's inadequate for what I think people 
> (including me) want.  Basically, it just loads and stores arbitrary 
> strings into the Category field, without doing any processing.  
> That's simple, but, as I said inadequate.

Makes lots of sense to me what you say here.

> I'd like to expand that to allow users to define categories.  
> Initially, they will probably just have names and descriptions, but I 
> can envision adding things like color-coding or default priorities 
> later; as a result, we'll need a way to store the category 
> information, rather than just storing arbitrary strings.

Well, we can store these arbitrary strings and just have GnomeCal
include some configuration for these categories.

For example "Holydays" could have a definition that goes "Set
background of days to red", so that we can see, nicely marked those
days in red :-).

Very visual.

Now, regarding configuration files, I suggest we use gnome-xml for
this information instead of the .ini-like file we have been using.

Gnome-XML is mature enough to address our needs, and support
arbirtarly complex structures (which is what we want here).

Thing is: gnome-config is a simple system for loading/saving simple
configuration items;  Anything more complex becomes hackish to deal
with. 

So we could have something like:

<gnome-pim:categories>
   <category>
     <builtin-name>Holydays</builtin-name>
     <day-render background="purple">
   </category>

   <category>
     <builtin-name>Birthday</builtin-name>
     <day-render background="red" foreground="yellow">
   </category>
</gnome-pim:categories>

> Finally, there's the question of where the category editor should go 
> in the UI... As a menu-item under Settings?  As a page in the 
> properties box?  Somewhere else?

It should definetly go under a menu on its own.  Setting/Define
Categories sounds good to me.

best wishes,
Miguel.