On Sun, 2004-08-22 at 19:27, Donald Permezel wrote:
I wholeheartedly agree that the capacity to output formulas referring to the input cells in the statistical analysis tools is a powerful feature for obvious reasons. I imagine the implementation is such that if 'formulas' rather than 'values' is selected, within the analysis tool formulae are output to the sheet which use existing functions to show the desired values in the correct cells. That is to say it is on an individual basis for each analysis tool that the developer (yourself, if I understand correctly) must 'figure out' the functions and formulae to go in each cell to display the same output as if 'values' had been selected (albeit with the 'dynamic updating' property of formulae). As a side-note if you want any help with this I'd be more than glad to offer any help I can.
I would like to implement all analysis tools with the `formula' version. (The "value" version is then a simple consequence and doesn't require any new code.) So if you would like to modify any of the existing tools in that way it would be greatly appreciated. Similarly we would love any additional tools. I realize that some of the tools we should add as well as some of the existing tools may require some new functions.
It is for this reason that I think the _capacity_ to only allow value output rather than value or formula output is a powerful feature aswell.
I agree, but code wise it is a trivial extension. (It requires essentially 1 line of code.)
If you would again take my example of an engineer wishing to conduct very iterative analysis on data - he or she may find the implementation (development) of the tool, such that all the analysis is calculated with formulae on the sheet (considering its possibly highly iterative nature) impossible, or at best extremely time consuming. Furthermore such situations may arise when the 'live-update' property of formulae (rather than values) isn't very important- perhaps the data sets to be analyzed never (or infrequently) need to be changed after analysis.
I can see that for very specific custom purposes only a `value' version may need to be implemented. But in that case we should really have a (still to be implemented) scripting language in gnumeric
Perhaps I could change the documentation to detail the ability to work with formula rather than values as in 1.3.x? With the several statistical functions already implemented with formulae as a reference I'm sure I could manage it.
In fact you will find that it is much simpler to implement the 'live-formula' version than the fixed value version, provided there are obvious formulas available for the tools.
Is there anything else you (or anyone else) think might be expanded upon or improved?
THe only note would be that for pure `value' versions the data collection functions in analysis-tools.c are discouraged. The similar implementations in collect.c should be used. (This is one of the places where we currently duplicate code in gnumeric and this duplication should hopefully be removed.)
On a more specific note, the use of dialog_tool_init requires that the glade file uses specific field names otherwise chaos results.Thanks! I'll investigate that and update the documentation as soon as I have it figured.
If you look at the code for dialog_tool_init you will find the specific names of the glade objets expected. Let me know if you need any clarification. Thanks Andreas -- Andreas J. Guelzow Taliesin Software, Shelties, Pyr Sheps and Shetland Sheep
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