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First of all it is really great to have generalized AJDT Visualizer! However current UI makes difficult to deal with such data representation. Group labels hardly fill into narrow columns. I'd like to suggest to turn this component 90 degrees and use table widget with a custom column renderer instead. It will make even easier to implement all kind of sorting and filtering using common table model and will also scale better for a large number of groups.
Thanks for the suggestion, it does sound interesting. We will investigate, although we won't get to it for a while as we have lots to do on ajdt.
Matt, I can probably cotribute column renderer that should substitute a current bars. Also it seems a good idea to use a tree with columns widget that had been added in 3.1M5 - http://dev.eclipse.org/viewcvs/index.cgi/org.eclipse.swt.snippets/src/org/eclipse/swt/snippets/Snippet170.java?rev=HEAD&content-type=text/vnd.viewcvs-markup This will allow to show hierarchical overviews and dynamically expand groups. Another idea is to have some kind of outline/details panel that will show a list of markers for selected group. Not sure if there is a equivalent view available yet in AJDT. Interestingly, if you'd use search provider that details view will be pretty much the same as Search view...
Eugene, We obviously welcome contributions, although we have to consider new function carefully in terms of performance and consistency etc. It would be good if you could implement this purely using the renderer extension point, so that it is available as an alternative renderer in the preference page. But it might require more widespread changes. The new tree column widget does look useful. Let us know if you do develop a prototype of this.
Matt, I'm not completely sure yet that I will be able to do a complete implementation. Do you think if it worth to keep current implementation? I believe that it is practically difficult to observe it when number of groups is large. There is another point of view to this. Most of the users already get used to a tabular data representation when items are ordered vertically. More over all input devices (such as mouse scroll weel) and output (monitors are wider horizontally) are better adjusted for sush tables. I can tell you my impression when I saw this view at very first time even before reading some help and explanation for this UI part. I was basically misinterpreted it and were intuitevely trying to find some horizontal intersections that suppose to show some cross concerns between shown groups and because there was no any obvious logical explanation to visual appearance my impression was that this view is useless. Anyway I attacked it several times and already saw several content providers (including CME) and think it is really important tool that has a really huge potential and vertical representation will be more intuitive and easier to understand and navigate.
The Visualiser is well established in its horizontal form, and user studies have demonstrated its effectiveness. Also, much work has gone into improving its appearance and performance. So if anything I'd want a vertical mode available as an additional mode, instead of replacing the current mode. I think this would be relatively straightforward to implement using the current rendering routines - basically just swap the x and y coordinates. Using the new multi-column tree is also an interesting possibility, but we still need to support eclipse 3.0 in some way, so again this would have to be additional functionality.
Matt, 3.0 can be supported with just Table widget, which is naturally allows to sort and resize columns.
