[Kst] [Bug 120330] The datawizard should allow to visualize the current selection easily

[Nicolas Brisset]

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http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=120330         




------- Additional Comments From nicolas.brisset eurocopter com  2006-03-16 10:24 -------
Looks good to me :-) I think we should try it like this and get some user feedback as to whether they like it better this way, but I'm quite confident. Since this is a *highly interesting* topic, I can't resist the temptation to make a few remarks:
- what does the reset button do ? If it clears the "selected" list I think it should be on the left side (e.g. below up and down) and called "Clear list"
- to move the curves around, drag&drop might be better than (or a nice complement to) the "up" and "down" buttons
- it is important to preserve the ability to sort available vars both alphabetically and in the order they are provided by the datasource ("position"). But I suppose that's how it's planned anyway...
- one more complicated (but IMHO really interesting) feature we could offer is a way to groups curves at this stage in the "selected" listview, like I did in gaiw. This would make the "Curve placement" groupbox useless in the last page, but offer much more flexibility. The advantage of this is that it's much faster to do it here than changing plot contents one by one in the plot dialog later on. Note that there is something we need to discuss further here: do we initialize the list with the current list of plots and their curves, or only allow to add new plots ? The latter is certainly easier but could lead to consistency problems when the wizard in invoked when there already are curves. Anf finally, there is also the question of multiple windows (but we could handle that either with tabs or by just showing the current window). I will attach a screenshot of how gaiw does this (for just one window, it has no notion of multiple windows as xmgrace does not support this) to make it clearer... 
- a label below the selected curves like "Selection: x curves out of y possible" would be very nice. If we implement the above "grouping" proposal it could be "x/y curves in z plots"...
- to make this completely consistent, this is the page where it would be appropriate to have the "regrid" button since this is where you see how many plots you'll have in the end. Column break markers in the list could be nice as well...

Even though this may seem to make the datawizard more complicated for the user(which is true to some extent) I think the overwall workflow is much better. When you want to plot curves and arrange them other than 1 per plot or in a given order, the current situation is that you load the curves with the datawizard (probably 1 per plot), then go to each plot, call up the dialog, change the contents, apply, move on to the next one, etc. At the end, you also have to relayout the whole thing to arrange the columns in a reasonable way so that e.g. all curves pertaining to the roll axis (just an example :-)) are in the same column, and finally you remove plots you no longer need. All this could be done much faster in the wizard if we implement the advanced selection/grouping features.
Sorry for being so long, but I think this is really important, at least for users working a lot with the datawizard, and would contribute greatly to making kst even more productive (I get complaints about the lack of these "organization" features regularly).