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FixingVRJConfigStory

Full story

Implementation notes

Tasks in this story

Task details:

Restoring Help Information

It would be better if help information were displayed using a (read-only) JEditorPane or something similar that is capable of displaying HTML. Since we can put anything inside the <help> tags of definitions and properties, we can put encoded HTML that is then rendered by the help viewer panel. This would allow us to have more advanced, and ideally more helpful, help information for users.

We need to decide where to put the help information. Ben seemed to feel that the old layout consumed too much space in each context window.

Icons

We need to come up with an icon that identifies a configuration element. This icon can be reused in different places: the categorization tree, the add/remove buttons, etc. If users can associate a distinct icon with config elements, it will be easier for them to understand the UI pieces that manipulate and refer to config elements.

Re-Ordering of Multi-Value Properties

With properties such as the position filters, ordering of the values is very important. It would be nice if VRJConfig would allow re-ordering of the values (probably using the up/down arrows or something similar). This would only work for properties that have a variable number of values since properties with a fixed number of values require exact ordering. (Then again, since the values are indexed as though they are in an array, it may be useful to be able to swap values, even with fixed-size properties.)

Element Names

It could be confusing to users that the name and type of a config element are presented in the property sheet along with the property values. The element type cannot be changed, and the name is not actually a property. It could therefore be helpful if the element name were displayed more prominently across the top of the property sheet. Allowing it to remain editable in that different location would still be important, however.