Re: the 'locked' property on cells

["Andreas J. Guelzow" <aguelzow taliesin ca>]

Floris Kraak wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I've been asked by my employer to look into implementing
> read only cells in gnumeric. This functionality seems
> to be what the 'locked' property of a cell should be doing
> except that isn't fully implemented. 
>
> Furthermore, it also seems to depend on having the ability to
> 'protect' a worksheet which isn't possible using the current user
> interface. (at least, in the stable gnumeric version)


Any such major work should be done in the 1.1.x (gnome2) branch. The 
1.1.x version allows protecting of a worksheet using the 
Format->Workbook menu item. Select the protection tab and check the 
protected checkbox.

You will notice that you can't edit cells directly anymore, although you 
are free to clobber cells with various tools.


> So I have a few questions which basically boil down to: 'How hard
> is it to implement' and 'where do I start'. There should be an
> user-generated event somewhere going off when a user tries to
> access a cell I suppose but where and how do I catch it? 


Life would be easy if there were such an event. But there isn't, ie. 
currently you would need to find any place that potentially changes a 
cell...

> What tools
> should I use to change things (do I need glade to add ui stuff? or is
> vi sufficient?) 


Most of the current dialogs were handcrafted using emacs to write glade 
files... Glade-2 seems to have various issues that make it simpler 
(IMHO) to use an editor.


> Finally, I'd like to add this stuff to the stable version (or at
> least, have a patch that applies against that) but I'm not sure
> if that is entirely possible. However, given the fact that 1.0.7
> compiles and the CVS version doesn't even have a configure script
> let alone satisfied build dependencies I'd still like to try using
> that.


Pardon? The cvs version configures (autogen.sh) and compiles just fine. 
There are significant differences between the 2 versions and doing this 
in 1.0.7 will be essentially a separate project from 1.1.x.


> This leads me to ask what the status is on these features (the
> protected worksheet and locked cells) in the development branch - 
> is it ok to start work in the stable tree or would I be colliding with
> someone else's work then?


In the development branch cell protection is implemented as far as the 
direct editing is concerned. It will probably only take me a few hours 
to fix the analysis tools to watch for locked cells. (In the stable 
version this would take significantly longer.)


> Regards,
> Floris Kraak

Andreas

--
Prof. Dr. Andreas J. Guelzow
http://www.math.concordia.ab.ca/aguelzow