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

[Markus Mohrhard]

Hello Astron, Christoph, Kohei,

sorry that it took me a bit to respond but I tried to finish my
remaining tasks for 3.5 before focusing on this task.

Let me just respond to the comments you made in all your posts:

I think that performance is an important factor even if it only
matters for 20% of our users. We are working hard to make Calc faster
and easier to use with complex documents. In my opinion it is a
central point because the person using calc nearly every day are the
people who have much more big documents. And then range names are an
advanced feature which helps a lot in handling big documents.
Therefore I think we should be extremely careful introducing a nice
dialog which on the other hand makes it nearly unusable for the people
who really need and use this feature.

I'm still not totally convinced that a modeless dialog is the best way
to go, so I list here my pros and cons for this:

pro modeless dialog:

- can be used like the navigator(opened all the time if needed)

- modifications in the spreadsheet are possible while working with the
dialog( is that really an advantage? makes handling of the dialog much
more difficult if we for example delete a sheet and now several of the
range names disappear or are modified)

con modeless dialog:

- marking a range in the spreadsheet can no longer automatically be
used for the expression line ( nice feature in my opinion )

- a lot of undo steps in our undo history, with a modeless dialog we
can still use one undo entry for all range name changes that were done

- we can recalculate the sheets when we close the dialog


So my idea would be to use something in the direction of Astron's
suggestion but modal. Then we can think about how we can make ( if we
still want) this dialog modeless without loosing performance for the
3-6 release. We would have a nice dialog for the 3-5 release without
any regressions and will have enough time to think about how we can
address the disadvantages of a modeless dialog. And we should not
forget that the feature freeze is 5 weeks and we should have finished
our work on this except for some minor bug fixes.

I know that this is not a perfect solution but in my opinion a new
dialog which introduces performance problems is neither perfect.

What do you think about this idea?

Regards,
Markus