[Libreoffice] Calc Standard Filter behaviour

[Kohei Yoshida]

Hello Tibby,

First off, welcome to this project!  And I'm glad to see you taking on
fixing this one.  We have lots of silly UI issues like this, and it's
good to have more hackers joining in to fix them.

On Tue, 2011-03-08 at 19:24 +0000, Tibby Lickle wrote:

> 1. Remember the original user-entered condition for each row in the
> filter and replace the "=" with it if the user enters a non-special
> value.
> 2. Don't accept the auto complete value as final until some other user
> interaction (e.g. the value combo box loses focus or the user clicks
> the OK button) occurs.

To me, 2 seems like more correct approach, and that's how I would do it
if I were to fix it.

Now, one difficulty is when to decide the value has been committed.  The
way I see it is that, when (as you said) the focus shifts away from the
input box, we can probably consider the value to be final, and/or when
the user hits OK.  While the focus is still on the input box, whenever
the text has selection applied on parts of it, I would consider the
value to be "transitional" hence not final.  There may be other corner
cases to this, but this is how I would generally approach this.

One thing we *could* try as an experiment is to disable the OK button
while the value is still in auto completion.  This would prevent the
user from not seeing the value of the operator change by surprise.

Now, to me the best solution is to *not* show any auto completion value
in the text box itself, but to show a little popup box with possible
auto-completion options to choose from, while leaving the typed value in
the box intact.  But this would require a little more coding and could
potentially become more difficult to figure out.  So I think the above
solution would be good enough, and much better than what we have now.

> Seems trivial but I don't want it to seem inconsistent. What would
> suit LibreOffice best?

I would pick 2.

> Also - is it best to discuss things like this here or on bugzilla?

I personally prefer the mailing list since it's easier to get someone
else's attention when needed.  But we sometimes discuss things in the
bugzilla itself if it's very trivial.

Hope this helps.  And let us know if you need help.

Best,

Kohei

-- 
Kohei Yoshida, LibreOffice hacker, Calc
<kyoshida at novell.com>