[Kst] [Bug 120749] Ability to display meta-info about a datasource

[Nicolas Brisset]

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http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=120749         




------- Additional Comments From nicolas.brisset eurocopter com  2006-01-25 11:44 -------
Thanks for the report :-) I was planning to do it, but never got around to it. When I brought this discussion to the list recently, George answered he'd be glad to add more support for metadata, but that we'd need a concrete idea of how it can be implemented/used. As this is currently pretty open, there certainly is a need to "standardize" a bit.
My suggestion (essentially the same as Matt's) would be for the datasource to pass two lists to kst:
- a list of string/numerical value pairs (e.g. Number of variables/500)
- a list of string/string pairs (e.g. Author/Linus)

The first list could be used to create new scalars, and the second would go into strings (which by the way implies the creation of a kst list of strings, hence bug #120772). That in itself would allow the user to display metadata easily (note that they'd need to update if used in a label and the datafile is changed, this is very important !).

To extend the use of metadata further, I also like the idea of having:
- a datasource-specific dialog with that information in tabular format, but I don't really see where this should go. Maybe add some lines in the data manager to list for each loaded datasource: filename, number of fields/matrices available, number used, and a tooltip with metadata or a link or RMB popup that would open up a specific dialog.
- an optional window/page that would display all metadata for currently used datasources.
I suppose we'll have to open separate reports for these last 2 ideas...