Description Greg Adams 2001-10-10 22:39:34 EDT

id  RATLC00002725     Priority: 3
Headline:  Preferences should be re-ordered. 
 
 Description:  
 It is not possible to specify a desired order for items in the Preference Dialog.

Steps to reproduce: 
As an example, given this set of categories for Preferences: Shapes/Connectors, 
General, Model Explorer, Classes/Interfaces  
the developer would like to control the order that they are displayed on the Preferences page. 

The desired order is: 

- General 
- Classes/Interfaces 
- Model Explorer 
- Shapes/Connectors 

Specifying this order in the plugin.xml failed to produce the desired ordering. 
It is not clear how the items are being sorted or how to change the ordering. 


Desired behavior: 

A method or mechanism is exposed that allows the developer to specify the order of the list of  preference categories. 


OTI PR# IBM 1GBCN5F: ITPUI:ALL 


NOTES:

GDA (7/16/01 1:21:36 PM)
	If we expose this it would be exposed only in subtrees. Plugins must not be allowed
	to control the topmost order.

RG (7/16/01 4:44:01 PM)
	Plugins don't own their subtree. Anyone can specify the same subtree. The plugin.xml which
	will be read first is unpredicatable. Thus we collect all the items in a subtree from
	all plugins and sort them alphabetically.

	Currently we allow a page to specify a parent category. A solution might be to allow a page
	to specify an "order after" category (this category would be a sibling). All pages in a subtree without
	an "order after" category would be sorted alphabetically. Pages with an "order after" category would
	then be inserted after their specified category. Any conflicts (>1 page with the same "order after" category)
	would be resolved by alphabetical ordering.

	It is important that page ordering be deterministic independent of plugin.xml read order.