Review Request: KHolidays: New Holiday Region Selection widget

[John Layt]

> On 2010-10-04 13:16:27, David Jarvie wrote:
> > I wonder whether it would be better to group countries by continent, as for time zone selection. One reason might be if there were cases where a user's country is not in the list, but a neighbouring country might supply suitable holidays - in this case, grouping by continent would make it easier to find a neighbouring country (bearing in mind that not all other countries will be in the list either).
> > 
> > I don't think the default column heading "Select" is intuitive enough when "Days Off" is displayed alongside. I suspect that many people (myself included) would normally equate "holiday" with "day off". In this case, it isn't obvious what the "Select" column would be for. Having some acquaintance with KDE holiday files, I think I may know what the distinction is, but without knowing KDE holiday files I'd be completely in the dark. In any case, it would be more natural for the "Days Off" column to precede the "Select" column (suitably renamed).
> > 
> > In the documentation in the header, there should be an explanation as to why or why not a developer should choose to display the Language column. It isn't obvious, to me at least, that language would be relevant to choosing a holiday region. If one language was spoken in one region and another was spoken in another region, then I'd expect the holidays to be different, but that would be because it was a different region. And if a single holiday had a different name in one language from another, I'd expect the displayed name to follow the user's locale language, not the holiday file's.
> > 
> > It's a pity that your indent will have to be changed to 2 spaces - it's much more legible using 4 spaces.

Some good points to think about.

I'm not sure about Continents, as that would make it less obvious for the main use case when finding your country when it does exist.  I'll have a play with the idea anyway.  The region name ordering does need some improvement, I'm working on some changes for holiday types which would allow us to split things up more so that should help.  Once we have more categories to select from then better sorting will be possible, in fact desirable as we will have non-geographical region based files.

I did struggle with the select/days-off thing.  The main use case would be where for example a UK business user wants to show on his calendar the holidays for England, Germany and the USA so he knows when his business clients have holidays, but obviously only wants the England holidays to count as Days Off for his scheduling or showing red highlights.  You're right the primary use is for a single region and it should default to being used as Days Off, it just seemed to me to have the second column be an opt-out named "Don't use for Days Off" was more awkward and inconsitent, i.e. one tick works as opt-in and the other as opt-out.  Perhaps clicking the first column should automatically select the second?  This will become especially important when we have categories and separate files for Public, Religious and Cultural holidays and more users will have cause to select multiple files.  I wonder if a combo box with values for "Don't Use", "Info Only", and "Days Off" might be better (but that wouldn't work in single selection mode)?  The tooltip and whatsthis probably need to explain the difference better, but it does depend on what the client uses it for, e.g. KOrganizer will use Days Off for scheduling, but the Plasma Clock will only use it for colouring days.

The Language column is an artifact of the holiday region files only supporting a single language and not having any translations available, without displaying the language the user wouldn't know which they were getting.  For example, Belgium has 3 official languages, ideally there would be a single holiday region file for the national holidays with i18n() taking care of the rest, but that's not possible yet (hopefully in 4.7 with a new xml file format and proper i18n tools).  I did think of only showing files available in the users language, but that would prevent multilingual people using files they need that are only in other languages.  So I left that to the app to decide if they wanted to filter for language.  Also if the app doesn't have much space they could hide the language column and just rely on the tooltip to show the difference.  Perhaps the middle ground would be to initially only list the current language, but have a button or tickbox to show all languages?  Anyway, I'll improve the docs.


- John


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On 2010-10-02 18:21:32, John Layt wrote:
> 
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> This is an automatically generated e-mail. To reply, visit:
> http://svn.reviewboard.kde.org/r/5518/
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> 
> (Updated 2010-10-02 18:21:32)
> 
> 
> Review request for kdelibs and KDE PIM.
> 
> 
> Summary
> -------
> 
> Implement a standard widget in the KHolidays library for clients to use to allow users to select holiday regions to be displayed.  The widget provides a number of modes and features to fit most use case scenarios I can think of:
> * A display only mode
> * A single Holiday Region selection mode
> * A multiple Holiday Region selection mode with optional secondary selection for Days Off / preferred Holiday Region
> * A search line
> * Ability to modify level of detail displayed when space is limited
> 
> Some points to think about:
> 1) I've implemented Qt Designer plugin support for the widget using a KHolidays specific plugin, but should the Designer support actually be at kdepimlibs level instead, i.e. all kdepimlibs widgets in a  single shared plugin?
> 2) Naming of the widget, enum and api calls
> 3) The layout of the selection boxes and columns
> 
> 
> Diffs
> -----
> 
>   /trunk/KDE/kdepimlibs/includes/KHolidays/HolidayRegionSelector PRE-CREATION 
>   /trunk/KDE/kdepimlibs/kholidays/CMakeLists.txt 1180311 
>   /trunk/KDE/kdepimlibs/kholidays/holidayregionselector.h PRE-CREATION 
>   /trunk/KDE/kdepimlibs/kholidays/holidayregionselector.cpp PRE-CREATION 
>   /trunk/KDE/kdepimlibs/kholidays/holidayregionselector.ui PRE-CREATION 
>   /trunk/KDE/kdepimlibs/kholidays/kholidays.widgets PRE-CREATION 
> 
> Diff: http://svn.reviewboard.kde.org/r/5518/diff
> 
> 
> Testing
> -------
> 
> Test client implementation done in the Plasma clock/calendar.
> 
> 
> Screenshots
> -----------
> 
> Widget example
>   http://svn.reviewboard.kde.org/r/5518/s/523/
> 
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> John
> 
>

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