[Dev] wxGrid/CollectionGrid discussion followup

[Alec Flett]

After some short discussion about what we'd need in our own Grid, a number of us kept referring back to the existing wxGrid, and how they handled some of the issues. We ended up refocusing the meeting to discussions of existing wxGrid issues that we're having in Chandler right now. This helped us frame the specific problems so we could figure out if the situation was bad enough to even consider a new grid implementation So we came up with this list of wxGrid issues to investigate in the next week or two. These are basically problems we forsee, or are already having with the existing wxGrid. We may discover that most of these issues can be easily addressed by small changes to grid, or by changing some of the ways we use grid itself. If we can do that for all issues, then its probably worth sticking with wxGrid going forward. If we hit any major roadblocks with these issues, then we can continue the discussion of making our own grid. The other thing we talked about was getting more people familiar with the wxGrid code itself, as we may see how wxGrid has solved some of the very issues we're raising. John mentioned that the wxWidgets docs for wxGrid tend to be a little out of date.. he suggested taking a look at the wxPython and wxWidgets C++ demos for using the grid. I tracked them down here: wxPython http://svn.osafoundation.org/chandler/trunk/internal/wx/wxPython/demo/Grid.py http://svn.osafoundation.org/chandler/trunk/internal/wx/wxPython/demo/GridHugeTable.py http://svn.osafoundation.org/chandler/trunk/internal/wx/wxPython/demo/GridStdEdRend.py (others at http://svn.osafoundation.org/chandler/trunk/internal/wx/wxPython/demo/ ) I couldn't find the C++ demos - john, do you know where we can find them? I think they're in our own tree somewhere, I just don't know where. Here's the list of issues with the current wxGrid: Attribute Editor ownership model - the grid is making a lot of assumptions that data in the grid is homogenous, and this means that it is really geared to using the same AE for all items in a given column. Hard to pass metainformation about each row/column to the AE's - so that we can easily style data in AE, or choose among AEs depending on the specific item/attribute being editor, or other metainformation The column header is ugly and we'd like to incorporate David's colheader widget Threading and Grouping - i.e. like e-mail - these are just a few of the issues when different rows in the grid are related to each other, when their appearance may depend on surrounding items Date formatting - how to dynamically display the date relative to today, and still be data-agnostic Handling of recurring items - how do we display psuedo-virtual items that aren't necessarily in a collection Fish-eye - magnification of specific items Sections - of course, we don't really know what this looks like just yet.. Issues where the grid thinks its sort of a fixed size, whereas we view it as more dynamic Mouse hover and other ui interaction I welcome everyone to offer up some of your thoughts on any of the issues above that you've thought about. I have a few ideas about how we can solve some of these problems that I'll go into in another e-mail. I think that until the end of the year, we'll just leave this as kind of an open discussion, and in January we can start discussing specifics and decide once and for all if we want to stick with wxGrid or not. Alec

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