Re: [ui-best-practices-working-group] [platform-ui-dev] Blocking UI: Wiz

[Doug Schaefer <dschaefer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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.

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.

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

Doug.

From: <platform-ui-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx> 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