Re: [lmi] Allow direct drill-down editing in census manager

[Vaclav Slavik]

On Sat, 2010-07-24 at 23:57 +0000, Greg Chicares wrote:
> Is there an easily-accessible program on the web that demonstrates these
> capabilities, or even a set of screen shots? I suppose they're trees or
> forests in an abstract sense, but in a visual sense I'd guess they're
> sets of 2-D planes...like tabbed "worksheets" in a spreadsheet program?

It's just a generalization of wxTreeCtrl (items organized in a tree with
collapsible nodes, where items can only have one label) and wxListCtrl
(multi-column display, but with flat structure). IOW, it's a
multi-column wxTreeCtrl. In yet other words, it's a superset of both
wxListCtrl and wxTreeCtrl.

See partial screenshots here:
http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/classwx_data_view_ctrl.html

A representative image of the GTK+ version of this control is here:
http://people.gnome.org/~martink/2005/stuff/Screenshot-nautilus-hierarchical.png


> The pre-wx predecessor of lmi used a 2-D grid control here, but all I
> had was a 2-D control, so the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis came into play.
> If I could see what wxDataViewCtrl offers beyond a 2-D visualization,
> I might find good use for it.
> 
> > If not, then either wxGrid or
> > wxDataViewCtrl would do. wxGrid has the advantage of being completely
> > generic and so allow just about anything you may need but it is limited to
> > a flat 2D array of cells unlike wxDataViewCtrl. wxDataViewCtrl also looks
> > better, especially under non-MSW platforms (it doesn't have native
> > implementation for the main part of the control under MSW), but the main
> > reason to choose it would be to be able to allow for hierarchical
> > structure.
> 
> Does wxDataViewCtrl have any disadvantages? 

I don't think so. If anything, wxDataViewCtrl has a higher chance of
bugfixes (it's a native commonly used control in GTK+ and OS X) and
active maintenance. It will require some fixes for LMI, yes, but last
time I touched wxGrid (admittedly, that's been a while), it was _full_
of subtle quirks or bugs. And it doesn't see much active development as
far as I can tell.


Regards,
Vaclav