Re: Thoughts on combo replacement

["Bryan W. Headley" <bwheadley earthlink net>]

Following up on Owen's mail..

1. I personally require the ability to select multiple items in the 
List. The premise is, the contents of the Text widget gets populated 
with the string value of the items selected, separated by commas (which 
obviously should be changeable via API)
2. The current API brings down the popup window/List when you select an 
item. If you are to be allowed to select more than one item, you need a 
distinct event to trigger off of to popdown. A button. Heaven help us, 
it's ASCII art time :-)

[_____________________][^]
+---------------------+
| Choice 1            |
| CHOICE 2            |
| CHOICE 3            |
| CHOICE 4            |
| Choice 5            |
|+-------------------+|
||        OK         ||
|+-------------------+|
+---------------------+

(Wherein the elements you chose, I represent in all-caps. And that thing 
above the popup window is the text widget and it's pull-down button.)

What this means is that prior to pop-up, but after button press, you 
have to inspect the current contents of the text widget, and hilight 
items in the List which have been chosen. A good place to put a callback 
to allow for dynamic population of the List. As someone who has used 
such callbacks in the past, I can only warn you that the GUI design's 
robustness goes to hell rapidly. (Imagine the List dynamically populated 
by database queries).

I rather do like the ability to specify the type of container in the 
popup window: GtkExtra's use of image buttons in a grid is appropriate 
in Gnumeric, word processors. Composites, such as check buttons, and 
text/images are useful. But, that means that the "return" widget (a Text 
Entry in the current ComboBox) needs to be genericized, so it can be an 
image button, TextEntry, whatever...

As far as my Text widget that has multiple values in it, well, there are 
 many circumstances where a question has several answers, none of whom 
of mutually exclusive. E.g., from real estate, they ask you whether you 
made improvements to a property. Yes, you installed new carpet, painted 
the walls, fixed the driveway. The user of the data knows from 
experience that the number of "yes" answers are finite -- maybe two out 
of a range of 20 possible choices, and they rather see and deal with the 
information flattened down into a single column than 20 yes/no prompts. 
Why fight them? It's a lot like SQL "SET" column...

Anyway, assuming I customize Combo to behave as I propose above, should 
it be a different widget ("MultiCombo")? Should it hide in GtkExtra? 
(Why, when it's full of cool spreadsheet and graphing widgets?) Should I 
hope it gets thrown into the Combo redesign? Suggestions...

Since I need something for 1.2 now, I may put it together in an 
GtkExtra-like package so it can be poked at without disturbing the other 
widgets...

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Bryan W. Headley - bwheadley earthlink net