Boolean fields and multiple clicks

Dear IJC gurus,





Just a quick comment on setting boolean fields in the grid view. I seem to require multiple clicks to set each box to a 'tick'. Perhaps a double click within the cell and then a couple of clicks to make the tick appear. This is a little painful when selecting a largish number of boxes.





I am running IJC 2.3 on Suse Linux (at least today).





(The new Marvin editor is much nicer)





Cheers





David

David,





Yes, we are aware of this, and have this under review.


But we have the current behaviour because we want editing all field types to be as consistent as possible, so you must always start with a double click to start the editing process, then you should be able to toggle the settings between the different states with further clicks.





We are wary about allowing a single click to edit approach as users would end up editing the value when they only meant to select the cell in the table (single click selects the cell, doube click starts to edit).





If you have any particular suggestions we'd like to hear them.





Tim

Hi Tim,





I don't know that I have a solution - but some thoughts:





1. Double click to edit might prevent accidental edits, but it is an impediment to intentional editing. Excel only requires a single click to edit.





2. Perhaps accidental editing could be prevented by an 'edit' mode selected along with 'Query' and 'Browse'.





3. Boolean fields have three states (I presume true, false and undefined). This is somewhat unintuitive. Also (following the double click) the first state selected in an unselected cell is 'false', then requiring yet another click to get to 'true'. It might be worth taking a leaf out of Perl's book and treating undefined as false.





4. It would be nice to be able to select multiple cells within a single column and 'right click' to convert that entire set of cells to true or false'. (in fact for all column types, it would nice to be able to select multiple cells and then set all of those to a particular value).





Perhaps that's enough thoughts!





Cheers





David

Hi David, thank's for those comments.





We are considering adding a additional mode to allow data to be updated. We have this in the plans. It should allow serveral improvements, such as being able to design the form and the validation specific to the needs.





Yes, boolean fields in IJC are potentially 3-state. We can't avoid this as data comes from a database and the undefined state does exist in the database, and so we have to be able to handle it. Sometimes this null state is actually very relevant (e.g. for a calculation where the calculation has failed for some records). However you can turn a boolean field into a true 2-state field by specifying that field requires a value (and providing a default). In this case the null state cannot be present. But I notice that if you do this we have a bug in the editor as it still offers the null value as an option (we will fix this).





You can change the values of multiple cells in one go using copy and paste. Copy the value you want to set it to, select all the cells, then paste into those cells.

Another thing to point out is that editing a boolean field can also be done using the the keyboard. Select the cell (grid view) or boolean widget (form), use F2 key to start editing and then use space bar to toggle between the states.





Tim

Tim,





I've actually had a lot of trouble editing booleans though the grid view. In earlier versions of IJC, I used the space-bar to toggle between states, which worked very well. In 2.3 (on both Mac and PC for all our users), I can only edit boolean by copy/paste operations. I routinely manually review thousands of compounds at a time for screening selection, so space-toggle is essential. Is there something I'm missing to make this work again in 2.3?








Thanks,


O

This is strange. Space bar is working for me in 2.3.


What is is that you are seeing? Space bar does nothing at all, even when you have double clicked in the cell to start editing?


(actually in grid view you don't need to double click - space bar can also be used to start editing once you have selected the cell).





Tim

With a boolean field highlighted, first hit on the spacebar enters 'edit' mode. All subsequent hits do nothing.





-O

Editing of Boolean field in gridview by using space is also working for me (Linux + Vista). We need more informations.





1) Do you use gridview or table in form with many other component? There are some focus troubles if in form is use extra Structure component together with table. If row in table is changed the changed structure component steals focus.





2) Do you use standard installer IJC installer or Java Webstart version?





Thanks


Petr

Quote:

1) Do you use gridview or table in form with many other component? There are some focus troubles if in form is use extra Structure component together with table. If row in table is changed the changed structure component steals focus.

The boolean toggle is a problem in a grid view for a standard table (no structures). In form view, where structures are displayed separately from a related table, there is no noticeable 'theft' of focus to the structure. When attempting to toggle to boolean field (or any field), the widget title in which the boolean is displayed goes from black to red. Other standard fields within the table edit normally, both in grid view and form view.

Quote:

2) Do you use standard installer IJC installer or Java Webstart version?

We use IJC installer.





Hope this helps.





-O

There is multiple click problem if more Boolean columns are in grid view. It works fine with single boolean column. Is it this problem?





It will be fixed in IJC 2.3.1 bugfixing release. We will release it in few weeks.





Petr

The problems with editing boolean fields have been fixed in the 2.3.1 update.





Tim

Thanks Tim,





I just installed the update yesterday and Booleans now seem to be functioning as they should. Thanks again for your responsiveness on this- makes a big difference on our end.





-Orion