Dashboard XMLUi
Hi Jeff,
The XMLUi code for the dashboard worked well for some of the changes
that we wanted to make to the dashboard. Essentially we're
experimenting with making the dashboard more dialog like rather than
an application window. So we've eliminated the redundant application
menu, status bar and toolbar.
The recent changes, however, seem to have broken some of the
interaction with the preferences. For example, if I start IDV and
got to 'Edit > Preferences > General' and uncheck all the dashboard
tabs except 'Field Selector' and close and re-open the dashboard the
menu that I took out of dashboard.xml re-appears and a close button
appears on the bottom of the window. ?? I'm not really sure where
they came from because they're not in dashboard.xml.
Also, when I close the dashboard after having applied the preferences
and re-open it it displays with the additional menu and button as
above. If I then close and re-open it again via the 'Data > Show
Dashboard' menu it comes up with all the tabs again, ignoring the
preferences.
Closing and re-opening also causes the window close button to stop
working.
More and more I find myself leaning towards making such changes in
code rather than in xml skins. It seems that code is a much less
convoluted method for the level of control required to implement some
of the changes we require.
Overall it seems that control and clarity of code trump the
customizability of the skins. And I'm a little worried about getting
too skin-able, skinning ourselves right out of both maintainability
and usability.
--bruce
