[Kst] Suggestions for datawizard and quicklayout widget

[Nicolas.Brisset at eurocopter.com]

As I mentioned before, I think it would be very interesting to improve the 
datawizard so that it allows to:
1) select fields from multiple files 
2) create curves with different X variables
in one go.

After a few hours of meditation and experimenting with gaiw/xmgrace/kst, I'd 
like to express some ideas here. I hope you will be interested :-)

Attached are 2 .ui files (mockups only, the .ui.h implementation is 
unfortunately NOT done, even though for the gaiwdatawizard it should not be 
too much effort to adapt from the current datawizard):
- gaiwdatawizard.ui: new data wizard providing a minimal improvement (i.e. 
mostly the 2 features mentioned above) over the current one, with almost the 
same pages (Select sources, then data, then filters/ranges/FFT, then layout 
options)
- quicklayout.ui: (somehow related to bug #86504) mockup of a new widget that 
would allow for a very quick an easy organization of curves (or other 
objects) within plots and windows.

I actually started out trying to reuse a gaiw-like listview widget to directly 
create and position the curves in existing windows/plots. I think it could be 
nice, but the implementation would bring some difficulties and probably make 
the wizard a bit too complex. For gaiw, it was necessary to be able to 
organize curves and plots directly as it's a one-way process: once you click 
on the button to create a plot, you end up within xmgrace and have to do with 
its cumbersome interface. But here, I think it is OK if the wizard allows to 
quickly create new curves/vectors and if we have a separate dialog to 
organize them (current possibilities in the data manager are somewhat limited 
in that respect, and I'm not sure it belongs there).

The quick layout widget is very incomplete. It would need either buttons or a 
popup menu to provide actions like "Delete", "Group selected objects" (in a 
same plot), "Separate selected objects" (one per plot), "Move up", "Move 
down". Another nice feature would be drag&drop like in KDE's bookmark editor 
(I thought of it for gaiw but never implemented it). We could also imagine 
dragging plots from one window to another (drop plots on the tab 
corresponding to another window). Buttons to add plots and windows also fit 
well into that dialog, and finally solve bug #83942. (By the way, is there a 
KTabWidget somewhere like in konqueror with create/delete tab buttons at the 
ends ?)

Comments ?

Nicolas

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