Save file dialog: "Overwrite file" behaviour/implementation.

[George Kiagiadakis]

Moving this discussion to kde-core-devel, where it belongs...

2009/6/8 Darío Andrés <andresbajotierra at gmail.com>:
> Hi everyone!. As a possible solution to
> https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=185590 ("overwrite file" function
> being implemented on the application instead of using the
> KFileDialog::confirmOverwrite option (even when it may not need to do
> anything special to it)), I suggest to add an extra optional parameter
> to every KFileDialog/KEncodingFileDialog save-related static function.
> (IIRC we can modify the API if this do not affect the existent
> applications behaviour)
>
> Can this be done? Do you have any other thought about this? Any drawback?
> Do you remember any other application that is not using the default method?
>
> This proposal will be useful to unify the Overwrite file behaviour
> which I recently fixed regarding
> https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=192333 (as Overwrite is a
> destructive action, Cancel should be focused by default instead of the
> Overwrite button itself)
>
> Thanks in advance.
> Regards
>
> Dario
> KDE BugSquad Team

Adding a new argument to the existing static KFIleDialog::getSave*
functions is binary incompatible afaik, but instead of doing this,
maybe we should change the default behavior of those functions to ask
before overwriting files.

I'll explain a bit better the problem for people that have not
understood. Currently those functions return a file name without
checking if it exists or not and without asking the user if he wants
to overwrite it, which leads application developers to implement a
"confirm overwrite" dialog, which may differ in behavior in each
application and possibly cause usability issues like the one in bug
185590. However, KFileDialog does have support for confirming
overwrite, but to use this feature you need to abandon the very
convenient static methods and construct a KFileDialog object manually
and call dialog->setConfirmOverwrite(true);

My suggestion here is to make this the default for the static methods,
which is something that probably most applications will want to have.
Of course this creates the problem that every application that uses a
custom confirm overwrite dialog will have to remove it, but it will be
difficult to track down all apps that do that. So, another option
would be to add new overloaded static methods that have the option to
ask for overwrite and suggest application developers to to use these
methods instead.

What do you think?