Attribute Editor - Click, Double-click, Enter and Tab Behavior

Objective

Provide guidance for bug #3320 : Single click and double click in Attribute Editor.

Reviewed and updated during October 6th, 2005 meeting with Philippe, Bryan, Mimi and Sheila.

Preliminary Discussion

The difficulty with this issue is to separate what is relevant to the AE (Attribute Editor) per se from what is actually a matter of navigation between UI elements.

The navigation has been specified in a Keyboard Navigation document need to add reference here.

This doc will not specify the navigation though it will touch this subject since entering and exiting edit mode is related to navigation.

The 3 things that needs to be specified for each AE are:

• Entering the edit mode
• Init at edit
• Exiting the edit mode

One can of course imagine a huge set of combination for those 3 things. For the sake of consistency of the user experience however, it makes sense to have as little as possible of such categories.

List of Attribute Editors (wrt to edit mode)

After an examination of Chandler, we can reduce the number to just 3 kinds:

• single line attribute
• single line DV attribute
• multi line DV attribute

Actually, the first 2 kinds differ only in the way they become editable (double click vs. single click). The criteria in making the AE immediately editable or not on single click is actually linked to draggability: if an element is draggable, then single click can only select the element (e.g. element in the summary view), if an element is not draggable, then single click can allow editability (e.g. field in DV).

Here's a synthetic table for the 3 kinds:

There's more to the AE editing behavior than that but all the others are (I think) clearly known and already implemented:

• Single click: reposition the IP (Insertion Point)
• Click and drag: select range
• Double click: select word
• Triple click: select all
• Arrows: move IP
• Shift arrow: move and select range
• ...: more that I'm forgetting...

Also of note, navigation and edition of non text widgets:

• Drop down : arrow keys (up/down, right/left) allow navigation in the pull down, "Enter" and "tab" select and navigate to the next element of the DV
• Check boxes : space bar toggles the check box, "Enter" and "tab" navigate to the next element of the DV

Navigation

Those issues are separated from the Attribute Editor issues and will not be covered by bug #3320. However, since entering and exiting the AE edit mode is related to navigation, we mention them here.

• Tabbing: "tab" skips from Sidebar to Mini-cal to Summary Pane to Detail View. In Detail View, "tab" goes through all the Detail View fields. Last item tabs to the Sidebar. First item shit-tabs to the Calendar View. Everywhere, "shift-tab" skips to the previous element ("shift-tab" will undo any "tab").
• Arrows: When not in edit mode, all arrows should map a navigation behavior that makes sense: next collection in the sidebar, next event in the calendar view, etc... (would be nice to have that part of wxGrid...) When in edit mode, arrows are use to navigate the edited field (text or drop down).
• Composited arrows: If possible, Page-up, Page-down, Home and End should also be implemented (same remark on wxGrid...).

Comments

MimiYin 29 Sep 2005: All Mimi's comments have been incorporated here above after the 10/06/05 meeting except for:

• The arrow keys should work on adjust numbers (ie. Dates and Times) as well as selecting from pull-downs (ie. Timezone, Recurrence rule) and checking and unchecking checkboxes (using the up and down keys).