[Libreoffice-ux-advise] XML Import

[Kohei Yoshida]

Hi Regina,

On 11/24/2012 12:30 PM, Regina Henschel wrote:
> Hi Kohei,
>
> Kohei Yoshida schrieb:
>> Hi there,
>>
>> This is just to inform you that I've started working on the wiki page
>> for my work-in-progress XML source feature.
>>
>> http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Calc/XMLSource
>
> I put some comments into the associated discussion page.

Thanks for your feedback.  Allow me to provide my input on those points 
here on the list.  First, my input will not mean either agreement or 
disagreement on your suggestions; it simply provides my reasoning.

First point:
"I would not expect "Data - XML Source" for launching the XML Source 
dialog, because all other cases, where data are inserted, are in menu 
Insert (Sheet, Sheet From File, Link to External Data)."

The reason I put it there is that, this feature will be tied very 
closely to Calc's existing database range feature in the later revisions 
(though not in the version that will go into 4.0).  Currently, you 
insert or modify database ranges in Data - Define Range, and I'd thought 
that it would make sense to place the new XML Source menu entry 
somewhere close, because of this reasoning.

Having said that, I'm not strongly attached to that placement, so I'm 
open for alternative placement.

Second point:
"Is it possible to import only parts of the XML source? In that case it 
would be useful, when the content is shown in the tree too, at least the 
first words of it. So it will be easier to select the desired node."

The answer is yes; the dialog allows you to import only parts of the XML 
source, and I do agree that it would provide a better user experience by 
showing a preview of the content.

My concern with showing preview is a technical one.  Internally, we 
perform partial "import" of the XML content in order to detect its 
structure.  We intentionally throw away things that are not relevant to 
the structure in order to keep the performance of structure detection 
reasonable.  The structure detection code is run whenever you set the 
XML source path, so if you are browsing through multiple XML sources 
when searching for the right XML content to import, making the structure 
detection slower may not be desirable.

Having said that, I like the idea itself.  Though we definitely can't 
implement that for 4.0, we can keep that one of the future improvements 
to consider (if the other people also think it's a good idea).

Third point:
"The dialog needs expand/collapse tools."

Yes, I agree.  The only reason why it's not there is simply because I 
haven't figured out how to implement that in the existing tree control 
we have.  Once we figure out how to extend our (one and only) tree 
control to show expand/collapse tools, we can show them there too.

Thanks for your feedback, Regina.

Kohei


-- 
Kohei Yoshida, LibreOffice hacker, Calc