Community
Participate
Working Groups
This entry is intended to house comments regarding usability of the connectivity framework. Feel free to add comments directly to this entry or create a new entry which links back (blocks) this entry. Refer to the connectivity usability page for more information. http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/Connectivity:Usability
Naw, no "problems," just "discussions" :-)
Sorry for any brutal comments ;-) The main usability problem I saw is with 'Connection Profile' wizard. There are two much steps : most users will just want to create a JDBC connection, so they need to set database type, driver location and connection information. 'Connection Profile' wizard first page will be unfriendly for most user (they will have to figure that 'SQL Model-JDBC Connection' is what they are supposed to select, the name is not obvious and it is not at the top of the list). The 'database' icon in this page does not look professional. The second page 'Profile name' is confusing and has no 'added value', a default name could be determined using driver type. In the third page, beginner that won't have yet defined a driver will have to go throught several dialog before setting there driver location ( '...' opens 'Driver definitions', then 'Add...' opens 'New Driver Definition', 'OK' opens 'Edit driver definition'. I think that the 'New Connection' dialog provided by WTP 1.5 was ok : it looked professional, all database types were listed in it and it was a one page wizard. I understand that DTP has more generic goals, but with Europa several projet will rely on DTP Connection wizard (Dali, BIRT?, ...) and this wizard will be used by many beginners.
Having one-page connection wizard is crucial! (I've added my comments in http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/Connectivity:Usability) I offer my help in fixing usability issues.
Assigning to Brian, since he will drive the Connectivity usability effort in 1.6.
Created attachment 91254 [details] Patch with a few usability fixes as well as other tweaks This patch does a few things... 1) It cleans up a number of externalized string that hadn't been marked as externalized. 2) It fixes a couple of externalized strings that we missed. 3) It adds the ability to set "autoconnect" on finish as well as at startup as two separate checkboxes. There may be times when you want it to autoconnect on startup (every time the DSE opens) and there may be times when you just want it to connect when you finish setting up the profile. 4) It modifies a few wizards to make some methods and variables protected for easier extending by adopters (necessary for the usability demo code I wrote also). So other than the "autoconnect" tweak at finish vs. startup, there's not much in this patch that would be visible to the user. More to come. --Fitz
Created attachment 92364 [details] Updated patch Updated patch
This has been delivered in the changes made for BZ 225651. Should appear in an upcoming build this week
Marking as "fixed"
Closing bugs
