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Re: [ui-best-practices-working-group] UIBPWG meeting on Wednesday, November 22nd - Post meeting discussion

With the hope of continuing this discussion, I would like to summarize the main items from last week's meeting regarding the Dali JPA Tools and our UI issues. 

Main items:

There is reasonable support for the "properties" style editing that is currently enabled for annotation editing in the Java source. Most appear to be in favor of reusing the Tabbed Properties framework if possible, as opposed to using a custom view.  There is also some support for the editing of annotations via a form based editor.  The main problem with this approach is that there is no way to embed the Java Editor into an editor tab along side a JPA editor.  This resulting distance between the annotation editing and the source code might be an issue.

There is support for the form based editor approach for editing the orm.xml descriptor.  There is also support for the "properties" style editing that is currently enabled for the orm.xml descriptor editing.  This conflict arises between the two basic modes of XML editing, one in which the user prefers to work inside the XML file, and one where the user prefers to be shielded from the complexity of the XML file.  Both of these modes of work are valid. 
Post meeting thoughts:

It is likely that users who prefer to work directly inside the XML (advanced users) will prefer to use the forthcoming completion functionality embedded in the XML Editor.  If that is the case, a form based editor may better suit the other group of users, who are not interested in what the raw XML source looks like.  XML source could be made available as a separate editor tab as is standard practice in Eclipse.  Advanced users could of course drop back to the form based editor when necessary.  A similar argument could also be made for annotation editing, although the grounds are not as strong.  The user generally doesn't want to be shielded from the Java source, but some abstraction may be helpful.  It doesn't help that the Java Editor is not embeddable.

Regarding the Tabbed Properties framework, I think most would like to see this framework used for any persistence properties.  In order to do this, a number of bugs/enhancements will need to be addressed.  Perhaps the UIBPWG group can help here, starting with individuals commenting on the appropriate bugs.  Here are the related bug numbers to comment on:

- 156277 - Tabbed Properties support filters and typeMapping for ITextSelection
- 158607 - need support for multiple plugins adding tabs to one PropertyContributor
- 162079 - Properties view should be a post selection listener

Perhaps we can discuss other options the group may have to help push Platform development at the next meeting, if there is time. 


Neil








Neil Hauge wrote:
There will be a web conference for the demo.  Details are below. 

If you get a chance, take a look at the email on the mailing list titled - "Annotation and XML configuration discussion (WTP-JPA Dali Tools)" before the meeting. 

URL:  http://conference.oracle.com/
Conference ID:  61884685

Neil

Bob Fraser wrote:

There will be a meeting of the UI Best Practices Working Group on November 22nd.

Conference Call: Wednesday, November 22nd, 10:00 PDT 613.287.8000 or 866.362.7064 passcode 892048#

 

Neil Hauge will give a show and tell on Dali/Web Tools for JPA.

 

Wiki: http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/User_Interface_Best_Practices_Working_Group

 

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