Re: [patch] Sleeping cells, correction

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Tue, Jul 16, 2002 at 09:38:04PM +0200, Eric Methorst wrote:
> > Cells do not have style pointers.  The mstyle_get_content_sleeping
> > is fast.  cell_get_mstyle (cell) is the bottleneck.  To be useful it
> > would probably need to be a dependent flag, however that is
> I just helped Floris with the patch; not very well versed in applications such 
> as a spreadsheet, so: what do you mean by dependent flag?
The base class for a cell is 'Dependent'

> > significantly more work to move around as styles are changed.  We
> > could steal a page from Quattro Pro and have a magic function
> > wrapper.
> >     =expensive(expression.....)
> Huh???
Rather than managing this property as a style option, we could
instead add a wrapper function that would have the special property
of putting the expression into 'sleeping mode' in your parlance.

> > The issue here is whether this is the best way to handle these use
> > cases.  As long as the extension mechanism is a new sheet function
> It think it actually should be a workbook function, as people may use several 
> sheets in a workbook and links cells from one sheet to onother.
You misunderstand.  by 'worksheet function' I mean a function that
the user can call from within a sheet.  THe alternatives are not
written yet.  They would allow us to have menu/toolbar entries to do
things.

> > we don't have much of a choice.  However, a longer term goal would
> > be to support commands also.  This would allow a menu/toolbar item
> > to control data refresh for external links and recalc for 'sleeping'
> > cells would be mostly be a nop (dunno how that would affect things
> > like cut-n-paste where the value has really changed).
> There sould be menu items in the patch allowing selective updates of all 
> cells, just the sleeping or the non-sleeping ones. Or is that not what you 
> meant?
Sort of.
I envision something like a 'db connection...' menu entry that would
bring up a dialog that lists all of the calls to the db in this
workbook that would allow a user to configure things by call or by
connection.

> I have tested cut and paste in non-sleeping cells, and the sleeping ones are 
> not affected. Copy-pasting sleeping cells will cary the sleeping flag, so 
> that's ok too.
Not really.  Lets say you have an expression like
    =expensive_db_Access(A1,A2) in cell B1
if you paste that into B3 it will now read
    =expensive_db_Access(A3,A4)
Note that the arguments have changed