Description Stephan Herrmann 2010-07-29 07:56:45 EDT

I should say that I'm not very familiar with the whole proxy issue because
normally I connect directly to the internet. However, once forced to use
a proxy I bluntly failed, because I didn't understand the dependencies on
the proxy preference page:

I saw a list of proxy entries, I added my data for the HTTP scheme,
then I briefly pondered about the checkbox in front, tried to check it,
even saw it briefly blink, couldn't see what else, besides clicking,
I could do to it and decided I had done enough - BUT my settings didn't work.

With help of a colleague we figured out that I missed to select the
"Manual" Provider.

My point is, that the dependency between the table and the provider selection
isn't clear for somebody who doesn't know what "Provider" means in this
context. In terms of this dependency the UI resembled nothing I know from 
the wide lands of Eclipse, so all my Eclipse experience didn't help me
figuring out how to use this page.

Some brainstorming of what I'd consider more consistent:
* Disable individual proxy entries unless their provider is active
  - this is brute force and may drive people crazy seeing the table and
    not being able to interact with it.
* In the "Edit Proxy Entry" dialog, display a warning message:
  "This entry requires the 'Manual' Provider to be activated"
* Make the two tables a direct dependent of the provider selection:
  - Design the page as having a top-level selection and make everything else
    a sub-page that is filled according to the current provider selection.
  - only show configurable options for the currently selected provider.
  - for non-configurable providers display a note like:
    "For manual configuration please select the Provider 'Manual'"
I'd probably prefer the third option because it'd make clear that there
is an order in settings to make: you needn't (+can't!) start fiddling with 
any entries before you select "Manual".

BTW: will there ever be entries in the tables that have a Provider value
other than "Manual"?? If not that would be a strong indication that this
shouldn't be a unconspicuous column, but rather the whole table should
only be shown/editable when "Manual" is selected - perhaps expanding the
table labels to "Manual proxy entries" and "Manual proxy bypass".

So a compromise could be: instead of switching the actual content of the page
only fully disable both tables and mark the tables as "Manual proxy entries"
etc.