[Kst] Re: Data Wizard issues (long post !)

[Nicolas.Brisset at eurocopter.com]

If I may express my personal opinion, I'd also favor changing the embedded 
dialog for at least 2 reasons:
1) appearance
2) functionality: it would be very nice to provide for simultaneous handling 
of more than one data file, and I think the space used by the embedded dialog 
could be saved and used for a list of selected files and their properties. 
Let me develop that point a bit (long post, you've been warned !)...

As I believe the datawizard is an essential part of the user's experience with 
a plotting tool, I think it deserves special care. I have some 
inspiration/experience on that topic, and I'd like to share some thoughts 
with you...

I don't know if you remember a previous post of mine to this list regarding 
gaiw (the "Grace ASCII Import Wizard"), which is an open-source qt-based tool 
I wrote with a couple of other people to complement xmgrace. For more 
information on gaiw, see http://gaiw.sf.net (not completely up-to-date but 
still relevant). As I said before, its coding is ugly (it was my first 
attempt at coding, please be forgiving) but I believe the usability is quite 
good, and a lot of my colleagues use it on a daily basis and like it a lot. 
In fact, most complaints I get relate to Grace's usability !
Now, I no longer plan to improve gaiw as I believe kst (especially with an 
integrated import wizard) has a lot more potential than Grace, but I'd like 
to see some of its features ported to kst's datawizard. 

Before giving more details, I'd like to explain what we typically use gaiw for 
and what the user requirements were:
1) quickly load data into xmgrace from any ascii file format
2) easily organize curves into plots, with as few restrictions as possible: 
curves in a given plot may come from different files or have different x 
values, and their number is not arbitrarily limited
3) comparing data from different files should be specially easy: if you've 
performed 2 experiments with different configurations and recorded the same 
data in both cases, it should be very easy to define plots with data coming 
from the two files (that's the "Common variables" mode in gaiw: e.g. when you 
click on 'VAR1', it creates a plot with 2 curves, VAR1 from file1 and VAR1 
from file2)
4) the plots/curves should be created in xmgrace with sensible defaults 
(line/symbol options and legends).

I attached 3 screenshots of the most recent version of gaiw (not yet uploaded 
on the web site) to give you a better idea of the functionalities. As you'll 
surely notice, a lot of things somehow resemble kst's datawizard. It is not a 
many-page wizard with back/next buttons, but instead has three tabs:
- (Plot) Definition, where most of the action takes place
- Plot options, which is used to preset a number of options that might 
otherwise be cumbersome to change afterwards from within Grace
- File options, which is there so that gaiw can work on basically any 
(possibly compressed) ASCII file. 
By the way, it would be nice if the ASCII datasource allowed to set the 
options in the "ASCII File Format" group: number of header lines, line 
holding field names, optionally line holding units... I've looked at the code 
and it is not obvious where these options could be "plugged in", even the 
code to retrieve field names and units in itself is quite simple.

>From all these options, a lot are linked with Grace usability problems and can 
be left out. I think the following are relevant for kst's datawizard (with a 
hint at where I'd integrate them):
- loading one or more files (first step in the wizard, lineedit+button to 
invoke kfiledialog+table or listview with file list and options, I have a 
precise idea of it and I'll make a .ui mockup in the coming days)
- organizing curves into windows/plots (second step in the wizard, which could 
be based on a simplified version of gaiw's plot definition tab). By querying 
the list of windows and plots/curves for each window, the list can be 
initialized. Then a couple of buttons allow to add curves in the selected 
plot, a new plot or one per plot. This replaces the current "Curve placement" 
group in the third step of the wizard.
- basic options (third step in the wizard, lines/symbols + auto-differentiate 
on width, color, style).

I hope you'll be interested in these ideas. Feel free to make comments and/or 
implement these ideas :-) I'll try to prepare a mockup to clarify things.

Nicolas

> In fact, I guess I do not like the embedded dialog....  at least for the
> reasons listed below, and for appearance reasons.  I would prefer it if we
> can revert...
>
> cbn
>
> On Tuesday 22 June 2004 2:05 pm, Andrew Walker wrote:
> > Hi George,
> >
> > I'll take a look at these issues. At this point Barth is not sure
> > if he even likes the appearance of the file dialog embedded in the
> > data wizard, so it may get ripped out altogether.
> >
> > Andrew
> >
> > ---------- Original Message ----------------------------------
> > From: George Staikos <staikos at kde.org>
> > Date:  Tue, 22 Jun 2004 13:34:19 -0400
> >
> > >   There are still some major issues with the embedded file dialog in
> > > the data wizard.
> > >
> > >1) The Next button no longer validates the file, and is always
> > > available. 2) Selecting directories (for dirfiles, planck databases) is
> > > not very clean because you have to browse into the directory you want,
> > > then click "Next" with no file selected.
> > >3) It's much slower.
> > >4) It doesn't come up in the right directory for the file that's
> > > inserted in the Location: lineedit.
> > >5) It becomes quite inconsistent between the first two pages when you
> > > select a file (either valid or invalid) and then go back and switch to
> > > an invalid or valid file respectively.  It's not clear that you're
> > > using the old data file sometimes because opening the new one failed,
> > > for instance. 6) The dialog is in remote file mode as well, which is
> > > incorrect since we don't support that yet.

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