Derek,
In response to your request for feedback…
A user preference turning on and off Find
Selection for copy/paste operations should be sufficient, but I can see why
some would want to be able to choose to pan, but not zoom in order to keep
their map scales accurate. But, for our operations, a simple “Find
Selection yes/no” would be sufficient.
-Evan MacDougall
GIS Supervisor - NTSI
From:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Tuesday, August 22, 2006
2:04 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED];
[email protected]
Subject: Re: [MI-L] SUMMARY: MI
8.5 Copy/Paste issue
As many of you have discovered, there is a change in
the way Find Selection is done in MI Pro 8.5. Some of you have also
discovered that Copy/Paste has done a Find Selection for many versions, and
this functionality has picked up the change made to Find Selection.
The
change itself relates to how we treated single objects. In the case of
single object selections and Find Selection, previous to MI Pro 8.5, we
performed a pan operation but not a zoom. It is unclear why it had been
done this way. One thing we do know is that there is no spatial reference
to provide a zoom for a single point object. The fact that find selection
did not work for single objects became a bug in MI Pro 8.5, and was
"fixed". Instead of the single object check, now there is a
check to see if the MBR of the selection is not empty. So, we will pan
for point objects or certain other cases, such as a selection containing
multiple coincident points. For all other cases, we will pan and zoom. I
think this fix is valid, since it makes the Find Selection command more
consistent.
But,
we understand your pain and we would like to do something to address this
issue. What we are leaning towards is a preference, or perhaps a few
preferences. Concerning how this would look, we would like your feedback.
Here are some options, but please feel free to provide others:
Should
we provide a preference to not perform a Find Selection during the copy/paste
operation?
Should
we provide a preference to not perform a Zoom, but still perform the Pan
operation of the Find Selection during the copy/paste operation?
Should
we provide separate preferences for Zoom and Pan (although we would not do a
Zoom without doing a Pan) for copy/paste? This would provide more complete
control, but also increases the complexity of the preferences dialog and the
accompanying documentation. While the added control may be nice, if it
isn't necessary is it just getting in the way, and not keeping it simple?
Particularly
if we have just a "don't zoom" preference, should Find Selection obey
this preference? Should Find Selection have its own preference? Or should
the Query > Find Selection always do a pan and zoom?
One
other point. We have a policy in maintenance patch releases of not doing
any UI changes. This relates to localizing MI Pro for different languages
- basically, we don't localize maintenance releases. So, our patches will
upgrade any version of MI Pro, regardless of language. So, we can't add
preferences as such in a maintenance release. To get around this obstacle
and make it so you don't have to wait until the next full release to get this
addressed, we can get these new preferences out of the registry. You add
a new specific registry key, and we will treat it as a preference. The
actual UI will be changed during the next full release of the product. We
have used similar schemes in past development cycles.
Thanks
for your input. To help generate discussion, you can reply to MapInfo-L,
as I will monitor the list.
Derek
Snyder
MapInfo
Corporation
