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Re: Custom JTree does this make sense?

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On Wed, 12 Jul 2017 10:27:21 -0700, Eric Douglas wrote:

> The screen also has a JTable.  Click a node/component on the tree to see
> it's properties in the table.  In this model each node needs individual
> properties as well as shared properties.
>
... and maybe I haven't understood, but it sounds a bit like a gloss on 
the older system.

Is there any way to pull out a list of the parts that represent top-level 
products? If so, you should be able to present that list to a user and, 
once they've picked the product they're interested in, work recursively 
down it to build a tree structure which you can than present to them as a 
JTable or JTree.

Here's a very different approach, which I hope will give you some useful 
ideas for designing the user dialogue. I once designed a planning system 
for planning and scheduling music broadcasts that, because of the nature 
of the data, had a hierarchy of menus that were seven or eight levels 
deep. Some of the menus were a few hundred pages long too. Think of all 
the published composers back to Euripides in 55BC, the 40,000+ musical 
works they'd written and the many songs and arias in an individual opera 
or song cycle, any or all of which could be selected up make up a concert 
or a broadcast. This was all on a mainframe's 80x24 green screens, so no 
large, scrollable pages were available. The solution was come up with a 
way to 

(a) let users select items by using abbreviations and 

(b) let them string the abbreviations for each level together in 
    order to drill down to the wanted item with one command

So something like: "=e=ti det=bee:sy no 5 part 3" would let a user who 
knew the system start from the top level (Enquiries) menu and dive down 
through the Title Details menu below that, select "Beethoven, Ludwig van" 
from the composers list, pick the third movement of his "Symphony for 
Orchestra No 5" and show the user what recordings of that were available 
for use in a program.

If you got such a command wrong, the system stopped at the last menu 
where it had found an unambiguous match, told you what was wrong and was 
pointing at the bit of your command that it couldn't understand.

If you didn't know the system well enough to do that sort of drill down, 
which its main users (musicologists) obviously did, you could work 
through it menu by menu and, as there were only 10 single character semi-
nmemonic commands to learn ('=' meant "match this abbreviation"), even 
its casual users found it easy to use and were soon drilling down with 
the best of them.
 
I got the germ of the idea from James Martin's "Design of Man-Computer 
Dialogues" - a brilliant book. Yes, I still have a copy and no, you can't 
borrow mine!
 

-- 
martin@   | Martin Gregorie
gregorie. | Essex, UK
org       |

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Custom JTree does this make sense? Eric Douglas <e.d.programmer@gmail.com> - 2017-07-06 10:52 -0700
  Re: Custom JTree does this make sense? Eric Douglas <e.d.programmer@gmail.com> - 2017-07-06 11:13 -0700
    Re: Custom JTree does this make sense? Martin Gregorie <martin@address-in-sig.invalid> - 2017-07-06 21:33 +0000
      Re: Custom JTree does this make sense? Eric Douglas <e.d.programmer@gmail.com> - 2017-07-12 08:45 -0700
        Re: Custom JTree does this make sense? Martin Gregorie <martin@address-in-sig.invalid> - 2017-07-12 16:56 +0000
          Re: Custom JTree does this make sense? Eric Douglas <e.d.programmer@gmail.com> - 2017-07-12 10:27 -0700
            Re: Custom JTree does this make sense? Martin Gregorie <martin@address-in-sig.invalid> - 2017-07-12 18:31 +0000

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