On Wed, 2004-08-18 at 19:36, Donald Permezel wrote:
Hi All, I'm writing this because in the lab I am in I am unable to get on IRC, so I thought I'd drop an e-mail to the list. I noticed the 'Extending Gnumeric' section of the help document is mostly blank. The 'writing functions' subsection has an equivilent document in /doc/developer (writing-functions.sgml), however for the project I am working on it became apparant that the natural one-cell-output of functions would be inappropriate (though I realize functions _can_ be made to output more). As such with the help of Robert Jerrad I put together a menu item which calls a tool which analyses input data and outputs it to the selected range - which is much more appropriate for my (and I suspect other) projects. Anyhow, since there is nothing about creating tools and menu items in the help documentation currently (and I doubt I could improve on the orgional 'writing functions' help document), I decided to write a tutorial document which instructs the user on how to create a menu item and widget which accepts and input and output range - and where and how to code for performing analysis on the data. As my knowlege of the C workings of Gnumeric is hardly very deep, being an EE rather than a Comp. Sci, the document isn't very technical, but I believe for engineers such as me wanting to perform mathematical operations on a dataset with simple C programming the tutorial could be of much use. I was hoping I could get someone to look it over for me and suggest improvements? And perhaps information on whether it would or could be suitable to include into the Gnumeric help documentation?
Hi Don, We greatly appreciate any attempt to provide some developer documentation. Unfortunately your documentation is based on some questionable code (that I wrote). Some general comments: Functions cannot only return sigle values as you indicated in your e-mail, but also whole arrays of values, so many `analysis tools' could be better implemented using a single array returning function. Moreover, a problem I see with all analysis tools in the 1.2.x release and most in 1.3.x is that they provide constant values that do not change with any values in the source data. In my mind this contradicts the basic idea of a spreadsheet where values are recalculated whenever the source values change. In the current cvs, you may notice that various tools (One-way ANOVA, correlation, covariance, descriptive statistics,...) allow the user to choose between formulas and values with formulas being the default. These tools therefore build a formula structure in the target range that will recalculate its values on the fly as the source data changes. Users that want to freeze those values can simply choose the `values' option. I think any documentation should emphasize this version of the analysis tools. I hope to change all tools to use this way of handling things. Of course many parts of your documentation apply to this situation too. On a more specific note, the use of dialog_tool_init requires that the glade file uses specific field names otherwise chaos results. Thanks Andreas
The help document is on the gnumeric-snob wiki at - http://www.datamining.monash.edu.au/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/mdmc/run-cvstrac.cgi/snob-vanilla/wiki?p=GnumericMenus
-- Andreas J. Guelzow Taliesin Software, Shelties, Pyr Sheps and Shetland Sheep
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