Re: [Planner Dev] The link tasks dialog - screenshot.



On tis, 2004-04-13 at 13:04 +0100, Lincoln Phipps wrote:

Hi,

Perhaps I was a bit unclear. I do understand what all the options does
(with the help of your first email), that's not the problem. The problem
is that I think that you have to read the documentation to figure it out
the first time (not necessarly a problem but it would be great if we can
avoid it), but that you have to give it a lot of thought everytime
because of it's complexity.

> Yup - you will. Reason being that the relation, lag and "direction"
> at least have a meaning here. The cascade/fan-out/fan-in only have
> any purpose when you have more than 2 selected tasks. Maybe I
> should only show the mode radio widgets when more than 2 tasks
> are clicked ?

I think this is going to be very annoying if you are creating a lot of
links at the same time. I was thinking some on another approach, instead
of keeping "Create a link" as an action (with a button you click when
you want to perform it) we make it a "tool". That is, select the tool
"Link tool" from the toolbar, then you click a task that you want to
link from, after that you click another task which you want to create
the link to. This way you can create links both "up" and "down".

Furthermore we assign a part of the display to be "tool properties",
there you can set what action should be taken when you select more than
two tasks. You can also set what kind of relationship you want FS,
SS, ...

When "selection tool" is selected and you click a task the properties
are will be used for Task properties (so that you don't have to bring up
the dialog to change percentage done, whether it's a milestone task
etc).

This approach will need more thinking and I'm not sure it's the best
idea but I feel that the dialog is too complex to be brought up
everytime you try to link two tasks. Especially since it contains logic
so you have to give it thought everytime it's shown.

> When its a second, minute or hour then no problems. Its when we talk 
> about 1 day or 1 week that there is a user understanding difference
> between a calendar/elapsed day/week/month and a working day/week/month.

I was mostly concerned that you don't realize you can type in 1d, 1w, 1h
etc. I've had a couple of different users wondering how to create tasks
with time less than a 1d since they didn't realize '1h' was possible.

> fan-out is a commonly used term used to describe "1 to many"  so maybe
> I should use "1 to many"?

OK, I'm a bit concerned with the translation of this term. If using
something similar to the approach I suggested above you could instead
say something like 'First selected task BLOCKS these other tasks' and
'First selected task DEPENDS on these other tasks'.

> Yup the direction is used as well. As to which task is the 1st (or last) 
> does depend upon the direction too. A fan-out in a forward direction
> would have all tasks having the first task as the predecessor.
> A fan-out in a reverse direction would have all tasks having the last 
> task as the predecessor.

So if the task in the middle (say that you have three tasks) is the one
that you want to fan-in to, you need to click "create link" twice. First
one time with Direction "Down" for the task above and the middle one,
and then one time with Direction "Up" for the task below to middle.
Right?

Regards,
  Mikael Hallendal
-- 
Imendio HB, http://www.imendio.com/

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