[Libreoffice-ux-advise] new range name dialog proposal

[Eike Rathke]

Hi,

Let me chime in late on this..

On Monday, 2011-10-24 23:28:09 +0200, Christoph Noack wrote:

> > > As far as I know, it is currently not possible to know the characters in
> > > advance, because the valid characters are influenced by localization
> > > settings and some other stuff. We may only know that "something" is
> > > wrong - any input has to be evaluated by the expression parser.
> > 
> > I think I already implemented somenthing in this direction. I think
> > the Add and the modify button are only enabled if the name is valid. I
> > still think that allowing all characters and showing a warning that
> > some characters are not allowed is better than too much magic that
> > nobody understands.
> 
> Do we know the characters being not allowed in advance? In my statement
> above, I guessed we don't know them ... that was my understanding in
> Munich.

The allowed characters are defined in ODF OpenFormula
5.11 Named Expressions
http://docs.oasis-open.org/office/v1.2/cs01/OpenDocument-v1.2-cs01-part2.html#__RefHeading__1017964_715980110
with the 'Identifier' EBNF and actually do not depend on localization or
separators used.

However, showing a list of characters that are not allowed is way out of
the possible, as it would encompass hundreds (or thousands?) control
characters and separators of the Unicode range. Provide a positive list
similar to the EBNF definition (but just saying "Allowed are letters,
digits and underscore and the name must not represent a cell address" or
some such for simplicity), or/and dynamically display the first invalid
character encountered.


> > Invalid entries in the expression line are much
> > harder to detect. I think these errors can only be detected if we
> > compile the formula.
> 
> How long does that take usually / worst-case? (just curious, I need to
> learn some new aspects)

I think this was already mentioned elsewhere, but in case it was not:
just compiling the expression for syntactical correctness isn't
problematic, we already do that.

  Eike

P.S. @all: please don't Cc my *@erack.de accounts on LibO topics
anymore, use erack at redhat.com instead so I get all LibO related mails
bundled on one account, thanks.

-- 
LibreOffice Calc developer. Number formatter stricken i18n transpositionizer.
GnuPG key 0x293C05FD : 997A 4C60 CE41 0149 0DB3  9E96 2F1A D073 293C 05FD
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