Re: Editable GtkCellRendererText and focus

[Kristian Rietveld <kris gtk org>]

On Mon, Jun 11, 2007 at 05:27:05PM +1200, Tim Evans wrote:
> I've attached a small PyGTK script that illustrates the problem.  Our 
> users are presented with a GtkTreeView containing a list of strings to 
> edit.  Having changed the values to their satisfaction, they click "OK". 
> The problem is that the last change they make is not applied: no 
> 'edited' signal is emitted on the GtkCellRendererText, so my code does 
> not modify the underlying model.

This is not a really easy problem :)  I think we have to take two things
into account when contemplating about this:

  1. What to do when the tree view loses focus?  Do we leave the cell in
     editing mode, or do we stop editing.

     Years ago, I think in 2.2 already, we have made changes to stop
     editing as soon as focus was lost.  I think this has been working
     well over the last few years.

  2. When we stop editing, do we confirm or cancel the changes?

     It feels like this decision can depend on what kind of data we are
     editing, etc.


I actually tend to agree with Tim here that we should probably commit
the values when we lose focus.  This is more or less equivalent with
what spreadsheets do -- I am only thinking about what users might compare
this editing functionality with here, GtkTreeView is not and will not
become a table/sheet widget ;)

If applications really need confirmation via enter or something else,
I'd say they can hook into the entry and maintain a flag whether entry
was pressed yes or no and use that information in the "edited" callback
to decide whether to change the model or not.

Personally, I've been disliking the cell editable API, because of its
short-comings, it's high on my list for redesigning.


So, if there are no objections, maybe we should revert.

Opinions?



regards,

-kris.