xmlgui, DefineGroup vs. MergeLocal

[David Faure]

On Tuesday 15 September 2009, Friedrich W. H. Kossebau wrote:
> > > >  <DefineGroup append="new_merge" group="new_merge"/>
> > >
> > > No, <DefineGroup name="new_merge"/>
> > >
> > > [MergeGroup or even just Merge would be such a better name...]
> 
> But without an append one cannot define where this group is placed in the
>  menu in the end. Yet I think one would like to have control about that,
>  no? Can this be made an official feature?

Good point.
Unit test finally added, works fine, feature is declared official now ;)

> > > The other downside of this whole mechanism is of course that a part is
> > > supposed to be useable in other hosts than konqueror, and if those
> > > other hosts don't define the same merging groups you end up with
> > > unexpected ordering... But ok, that's fixable if we define proper
> > > groups in konqueror and others apps follow the same naming, for
> > > example.
> >
> > Ok, please lets do that, as I said before I'm up for fixing up kparts in
> > trunk/ as we go along. So we just need to find the "common" groupnames
> > for the usual menus. How about the following:
> >
> > We stick to ui_standards.rc here and simply take over the merge's from
> > there and create similar named groups by replacing the _merge with
> > _group? Of course only those that make sense in the scope of konqueror.
> 
> Why only there? Looking at the ui.rc of KDevelop almost all DefineGroups
>  which use an append have the same name for the group as the name of the
>  append location.
> 
> Now, having to create the same standard groups in all hosts ui.rc files, is
> that what you propose, Andreas? Or should this be rather be done as kind of
> default by the XMLGUI code?

Hmm. I see the benefit, this is a way to actually make (some of the) 
ui_standards.rc merging available to parts (and other guiclients), since it 
defines merging groups that happen to be exactly where the MergeLocals in 
ui_standards.rc are ;-)
Clever; this way we don't really break existing parts, since they have to use 
group="...." explicitely.

Doing this automatically is an option; I think it's as simple as adding 
<DefineGroup>s in ui_standards.rc, under each MergeLocal. Want to try that?

> Not directly related, but idea popped up:
> And what about using a naming scheme like with the icons,
> group.subgroup.subsubgroup...? An action would fall into the first group
> namespace the XMLGUI host offers. But perhaps this is KDE5 stuff, as any
> separator char might be already in use.

I assume the use case would be "giving the host the ability to choose the 
granularity it wants for the groups, either a few big groups, or a lot of 
small ones"? Not sure if we need more magic in xmlgui though... :)
More seriously the real question is how many apps would want to use this.

-- 
David Faure, faure at kde.org, sponsored by Nokia to work on KDE,
Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org), and KOffice (http://www.koffice.org).