Re: [platform-ui-dev] Blocking UI: Wizard Dialog modality

[Wim Jongman <wim.jongman@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Sep 13, 2016 at 4:21 PM, Doug Schaefer <dschaefer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I’ve always started with the premise, dialogs are bad, especially if they’re modal. Are they really so important they need to grab 100% of the users attention and not let go until it’s satisfied? Some are, yes, but not many IMHO.

By default and without exception, all Wizards are modal. In many cases this is good but sometimes you want to be able to peek in your workspace or preferences.

 

Non-modal dialogs starts you down the path of having a multi-window application. At one point in history, we decided that was bad. Is that still true? Or are non-modal dialogs different enough to escape that criticism.

I can open many windows in Eclipse, detach parts, have help in a different window so I think that anyone thinks it is bad.
 

Are there alternative approaches to dialogs, especially the complex dialog case, that we could use instead?

The wizard as an ui paradigm is still everywhere. However, I could see that for example "new project" would just give me one form that I could fill out and apply over and over again without having to jump through all those hoops every time. For example, if I want to create org.eclipse.xxx.core and org.eclipse.xxx.ui. 90% of the input is the same. Just give me a form, I fill in the blanks, press apply, change the project name press apply again and have two projects.

It could probably reuse the wizard pages.

Wim

 

Doug.

From: <platform-ui-dev-bounces@eclipse.org> on behalf of Wim Jongman <wim.jongman@xxxxxxxxx>
Reply-To: "Eclipse Platform UI component developers list." <platform-ui-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tuesday, September 13, 2016 at 10:00 AM
To: "Eclipse Platform UI component developers list." <platform-ui-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [platform-ui-dev] Blocking UI: Wizard Dialog modality

Hi,

In addition to the wizard ui blocking discussion:
 

Users are often irritated by the modality of the wizard (blocking the underlying window). They are not able to navigate around for additional info whilst in the middle of a complex wizard. What I do is override the WizardDialog class to disable modality which is set in the constructor of WizardDialog. Something like:

   WizardDialog wd = new WizardDialog(composite.getShell(), myWizard){
      @Override
      protected void configureShell(Shell newShell) {
        // TODO Auto-generated method stub
        super.configureShell(newShell);
        setShellStyle(SWT.CLOSE | SWT.MAX | SWT.MIN | SWT.TITLE | SWT.BORDER | SWT.RESIZE | getDefaultOrientation());
      }
    };

I'm not sure if there is a pressing reason for making wizards modal. It would be nice if we could control this from the outside instead of creating an anonymous class like I did above.

Cheers,

Wim

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