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

[Lincoln Phipps <lincoln phipps openmutual net>]

Mikael Hallendal wrote:
> 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.

I think I'll reword this dialog: also how can we add a help button to
launch documentation ? Is there a standard method of doing this (i.e
like F1 in Windows and the .hlp files and the help topics).


> > 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.

This does sound more complicated than my simple dialog box. I think
what I'll do is remove the "cascade/fanout/fanin" options when you
click just two tasks and reword upwards/downwards to be more
descriptive as you've mentioned.

> > 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.

This is actually new functinality as the existing lag in the task
predecessor lag cell is hard coded as "hours" anyway - which needs to
be changed (bugzilla raised a while ago by me).

The tooltip should highlight this new capability of adding 1h, 1d, 1w etc.

> > 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 - I think I'll reword this to be more descriptive to users
as opposed to "programmer-speak".

> > 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?

Yes.

> Regards,
>   Mikael Hallendal
>
>
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