Hi Robert,

>> There's more than this. In fact, there are actions on a document which
>> are *not* covered by the "native" Undo operations. Especially via API,
>> you can do things which will never appear in the Undo stack. I can talk
>> about my domain here only (I could name you a few scenarios with form
>> controls), but I suppose there are others, too.
> 
> shouldn't be these operations covered by the native Undo operation? It
> means, all document changes via API should be saved as Undo
> operations.

What's "native"?

Usually, the code which manipulates the document is responsible for
handling Undo. However, there in fact is "native" code which manipulates
the document via the UNO API only, and since there is no UNO Undo API,
it simply cannot do this.

An example for this is when you bind a, say, check box in a spreadsheet
to a certain cell in this sheet. This happens via UNO (which is a Good
Thing (TM) in general), but this implies there will be no Undo action
for this. Nonetheless, this code would probably count as "native" code
in your implicit definition "everything which is not an extension".

Those and similar cases are where my interest in the Undo API originates
from.

>> Interesting idea. While it is not possible (architecture-wise) to
>> execute an action on a grayed menu item, the item could be available,
>> but show some text "not possible: running action", or something like
>> that, and then behave as described by you.
> 
> Maybe some different color or maybe animated menu item image (Undo
> icon + clocks or something like this). The idea behind this is that
> there will be no new control (button, whatever), but the old one can
> be extended.

An icon or a color or a sound or something like this is not accessible,
in that people with disabilities might be unable to recognize it. As a
general rule in the UI, every information has to be presented in an
accessible way. For the concrete problem of indicating that a menu item
has a "special meaning" now, this means you need to change the menu item
text. (Or, well, add a new menu item, or such.) However, I'd consider
this an appropriate solution.

Ciao
Frank



-- 
- Frank Schönheit, Software Engineer         [EMAIL PROTECTED] -
- Sun Microsystems                      http://www.sun.com/staroffice -
- OpenOffice.org Base                       http://dba.openoffice.org -
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