Description Ducky Sherwood 2008-04-23 18:19:43 EDT

If you select method foo() and then open the quick type hierarchy view, it will not show any subclasses that do not implement method foo().  It might be nice if the subclasses that existed but didn't implement the method were shown in grey, just like it shows superclasses in grey if they don't implement foo().

I recently did an observational user study of users nagivating through code.  One of the tasks was very difficult for people to complete, and part of the problem was that it was completely non-obvious that there were important subclasses.  (There was an obvious string in the GUI that turned out to be displayed in Parent class; everybody started by searching through Parent class, oblivious to the fact that because main() was in Child class.  (Part of the trouble was that Parent and Child had very similar names, but Eclipse can't help that.)

User A selected foo() and requested the type hierarchy view, and so immediately saw that there was a Child class.  User B selected foo() and requested the quick type hierarchy view, so he did not see that there was a Child class -- and in fact never discovered that Child class was involved.  While I can't completely tell from the transcript, I believe that he in fact believed that there *was* no subclass of Parent, since it didn't show up in the quick type hierarchy.


Obviously, this is a small sample size, so I don't want to argue that this should be the most important change of the next release.  It is possible that there are good reasons to NOT show the subclasses that I don't know about.  Still, I think if there hasn't been much discussion/thought about the quick type hierarchy's behaviour, perhaps there should be.


This bug is distantly related to bug 112917, in that both talk about the behaviour of how quick type hierarchy displays super/sub classes.