John Darrington <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> On Mon, Oct 01, 2007 at 10:10:29PM -0700, Ben Pfaff wrote:
>
> The reason I left out Z-scores from my initial DESCRIPTIVES
> dialog design was that I didn't think that they made any logical
> sense there. It seems to be that they should be on the Transform
> menu, or at least in a separate "Compute Z-Scores" menu item
> under Analyze|Descriptive Statistics. They're only a part of the
> DESCRIPTIVES procedure because it's convenient to put them there,
> not because it makes a lot of sense from a UI perspective. But
> moving them to a new menu item could also confuse users who
> expect them to be in the old place.
>
> OK. I'm not sure how often it will be used anyway. I think for now,
> this could be left unimplemented. Let's wait until somebody complains
> about its absence.
I should have noted that in fact I already implemented the
Z-scores checkbox in my working directory.
My thoughts on a GUI are not hardened into dogma.
> Recently I've been thinking the same as yourself; psppire.glade
> should be split up into seperate files.
OK.
> For
> examples, procedures can't run without any data, so should we
> gray out the Analyze menu until there's data?
>
> I think not. Procedures can run without data, although in most cases
> they will give trivial (and perhaps meaningless) answers.
How about if there are no variables?
> specific procedures have more stringent requirements; for
> example, DESCRIPTIVES needs at least one numeric variable,
> CROSSTABS needs at least two variables (for any sensible
> results), and so on. Should that be implemented by graying out
> menu items, by displaying an error dialog if the menu item is
> selected, or another way?
>
> A "good" GUI should prevent the user from choosing invalid options.
>
> If a procedure requires only numeric variables (or variables
> satisfying any other predicate), then you can enforce that by only
> displaying the appropriate variables in the treeview (use the last
> argument of attach_dictionary_to_treeview). See the weight cases
> dialog for an example of this.
I did that. But I was thinking of the case where there are no
numeric variables at all in the active file dictionary. Does the
answer change in that case?
> Currently, I don't think there's any way to deal with the situation
> where there are two fields in the same dialog which have different
> constraints on what properties a variable may have.
OK.
> Finally, there are constraints on what
> can be selected in a procedure before it can be invoked; e.g. for
> DESCRIPTIVES it's necessary to select at least one variable
> before clicking on Paste or OK. How should this be enforced?
>
> Paste and OK should be greyed ("insensitive" in GTK+ terminology)
> until the dialog has been set up so that sensible things happen when
> you click them.
OK.
> This is an issue not only for DESCRIPTIVES, but for nearly all the
> dialogs, and I haven't addressed it yet. Probably I should add a
> method on the PsppireButtonBox widgets. I was going to wait until
> after 0.6.0 before looking at that. Do you think it's more urgent?
No, it's not a big deal.
--
Ben Pfaff
http://benpfaff.org
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