Difference between revisions of "WTP Facets UIWG Walkthrough"

Revision as of 04:27, 30 July 2008

Search UI Walkthrough Eclipse UI Best Practices Working Group 7/9/2008

Prep/Homework

Take a look at some screenshots regarding the WTP Facets Framework.

Discussion Topics

The first wizard page of the Project Creation wizards looks OK and complies with the Eclipse UI guildelines. The idea for choosing the version of the primary facet on the first wizard page is accepted well.

When looking at the Project Facets dialog and the Project Facets property page there are lot of recommendations suggested.

• the checkbox in front of each facet
  • the current situation is that if the facet cannot be uninstalled, the checkbox cannot be unchecked. Instead a tooltip pops up explaining why it cannot be unchecked. This tooltip is quite a strange idea and does not comply with the Eclipse UI guidelines
  • checkboxes that should not be unchecked should be grayed
  • even better all checkboxes should be allowed to be unchecked, but if the user unchecks a facet that cannot be uninstall, then an validation error should appear.

• locking/unlocking
  • locking of facets is very weird and it seems that nobody (except Konstantin) knows what exactly it does. It seems like it filters facets depending on their constraints.
  • if it is about filtering of facets, it would be much clearer for the user if there is a global checkbox for showing/hiding the appropriate facets for the current use case.

• validation
  • the idea of showing validation errors is very much liked
  • validation error entries should not be selectable. Currently, they are and it this implies that the user can do something with this error (like quick fix), but actually he has no options for actions.
  • validation errors should not appear in the special widget below the facets list view, but in the dialog box title, or the property page title. This is according to the Eclipse UI guidelines.

• Configurations drop-down
  • The Save button should have ellipsis :-)
  • It would be better that the Save/Delete buttons are replaced with Edit/Remove/New/Import buttons like in the Java > Code Style > Formatter preferences page.
  • Save/Delete seems to be rarely used, even never by the ordinary users. So, it is better to remove them at all.
  • Creating and Deleting of facet configurations should be moved in a Preferences page. A link ("Configure") to this preferences page could replace the Save/Delete buttons.

• Runtime view
  • again validation errors are better than filtering. The user should see all available runtimes, otherwise it may be frustrating why a certain runtime is not available. When selecting invalid runtime, a validation error should appear.

Discussion Notes from Walkthrough

Conclusions/To-do's

Other thoughts

Eugene:

I also would like to bring up another somewhat confusing issue about facets. It is that for Java projects (and probably for some other projects) they imply certain jars to be added as project dependencies/classpath. I am not completely sure about internals of this, but this feature is conflicting with dependency management mechanisms and tools, such as Maven and also somewhat overlaps with JDT's own build path configuration UI. It would be interesting to see more detailed discussion on that.

Not sure if you know, but m2e Maven tools project is being provisioned at Eclipse and it is based on m2eclipse, which already has some WTP support (screenshots are based on WTP 2.x, so it may look slightly different then one shown to the UI expert group).

I would really like to find a good way to interoperate between Maven tools and WTP facets and how UI for that should look like. There is some interesting challenges around configuring Maven projects to work with WTP, but that perhaps belong to the cross project issues mailing list.