Re: [platform-ui-dev] Initial General Purpose Navigator proposal

[Knut Radloff <knut_radloff@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Michael,
Thanks for kicking off a discussion. Here are my thoughts.

Viewers:
The plan is to allow only a TreeViewer for the presentation. I think one 
of the major aspects of the Navigator will be the content providers, how 
they can be contributed at various tree levels, customized and reused. You 
could regard a table content provider simply as one that only supplies 
root elements with no children. We can keep this in mind going forward 
with the design but I'm not sure we should even allow alternate 
presentations. If we have a multitude of Navigator views with different 
content then the only common denominator would be the tree presentation. 
I'm not sure a Navigator would still be recognizable as such if this basic 
presentation can change (even if we are saying it can only change to be a 
table vs. a tree). Again, we can consider it but I don't think it should 
be a priority.

I don't think any of the standard actions are tied to a tree viewer. Copy, 
Paste, Move, Rename, Delete should all be useable outside the navigator 
context. Rename is special because it supports inline rename if you are 
supplying a tree widget. You don't have to supply one though. Am I wrong?

Filters:
The empty folders is an interesting problem, especially if you don't know 
the content of a container node. When you expand a container all its 
children may be filtered out by one or more filter extensions. It would 
probably be unexpected if the container then suddenly gets removed.

Action Contribution:
I was thinking we could just use the IActionFilter mechanism. However, 
that only works for actions that operate on your own elements (e.g., 
IJavaElements). To control action visibility for existing elements (that 
already adapt to IActionFilter) we could have IActionFilters that are 
specified explicitly in the extension (e.g., class = ). I believe that 
would also address your subscriber scenario.

Knut




"Michael Valenta" <Michael_Valenta@xxxxxxxxxx>
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06/17/2003 12:39 PM
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Knut, 

Here are some comments and questions: 

Provide a viewer that displays hierarchical data. 

Will the navigator be strictly a TreeViewer on the inside? The new Live 
Sync Vew (available in today's integration build) can optionally show a 
table containing the filtered changes. It would be great if the general 
purpose navigator could support this as well. However, if that is not 
possible or practical, it would be very helpfull if the general actions 
(cut, copy, paste, etc) were reusable (i.e. not tied to a TreeViewer) so 
we would not have to reinvent everything (The way it stands now, we will 
need to do this because many of the "reusable" resource navigator actions 
are tied to a TreeViewer). 

Allow filters 

We've done some similar filtering in the new sync view. One interesting 
challange is the pruning of empty directories from the view (i.e. those 
directories that existed but whose files were filtered out). We had to 
cache all visible files so we cold know which folders needed to be shown. 

Action Contributions and Modes 

We had this requirement in the sync view as well. The logical elements in 
the view are always the same type (IResource) but the selected subscriber 
(CVS workspace, CVS merge or some other subscriber like FTP or WebDAV) 
determines which resources appear and which actions are available. We had 
to create our own object contributions to support this because, as far as 
I know, the current objectContributions only filter by project nature and 
persistant properties on the project. A more general objectContribution 
filtering mechanism would be helpful. 

Michael Valenta 






Knut Radloff/Raleigh/IBM@IBMUS 
Sent by: platform-ui-dev-admin@xxxxxxxxxxx 
10/06/2003 05:55 PM 
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        To:        platform-ui-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx 
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        Subject:        [platform-ui-dev] Initial General Purpose 
Navigator proposal



An intial proposal of the work involved for this plan item has been 
released on the Eclipse UI team web site - this was one of our 3.0 M1 
objectives. Please see 
http://dev.eclipse.org/viewcvs/index.cgi/%7Echeckout%7E/platform-ui-home/navigator-proposal/general_purpose_navigator_proposal.html

Please post feedback/comments to the platform-ui-dev mailing list or 
annotate the plan item bug report: 
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=36961

Knut
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