Dijji
commented
4 years ago Excellent feedback! Thank you.
I have had great fun going through all your comments, and have now released version 0.6 incorporating the resulting changes. Please use this new version as the basis for your further testing.
Here are my detailed point by point responses:
- 1: Clicking on the area to the left of a control in the editor now shows its help, and selects the control quietly, without changing its value.
- 2: It is true that there is no way back to the original state of having no installed property selected once one has been selected. What I don't understand is why this matters. Clearing the selection gains you nothing, but it would remove the option of copying install property values to the editor, or of comparing them to the current editor values. Why do it?
- 3: Help text fixed (3, 4, 8)
- 5: Speculation added to help text for mystery values (5, 6). But in fact, I know, no more than you do. Experimentation may elucidate matters.
- 7: I actually tried out a couple of ways of spacing the controls out a little more, but they made things worse, so I abandoned them. My starting point was the combo boxes near the bottom, as they are the most crowded. The other combo boxes follow naturally. However, they are already the tallest controls, and this makes them taller. To make them less out of place, this leads to spreading out the text boxes. By now, the spacing of the names in the left column is becoming rather uneven, making them difficult to scan down looking for a property. Also, the checkboxes now look like they come in clumps, so they need to be spread out as well. Now the labels are a little bit more even, but still hard to scan because they are becoming further and further apart. At which point I revert to the original layout, and greet it with a sigh of relief. Much better. My conclusion: that the single highest priority is to make scanning down the list of property names as easy as possible. On the EditControl combo: it is not the Windows convention to reserve space to expand combo boxes. In fact, they are allowed to expand even outside the frame of the window in which they appear. So I'm leaving this as is.
- 9: I believe you on this one. I tightened up the code to increase the frequency of checks for editor dirtiness and immediately started to run in to the sort of problems you report. So I have cleaned up the code in this area, and hope to have eliminated the problem.
- 10: This is definitely a case where a group action on the properties make sense. The scenario is where somebody has created a set of custom properties for their software, and for package installation purposes, wants to define all of their custom properties in a single .propdesc file, which is the standard practice (Office distribute their custom properties in this way, for example). Where I fell short is enabling you to export from any level, including all properties in the chosen subtree. This has now been remedied. There is still the need to create a command line utility to install the propdesc when invoked by the installation package, which is on the work list. This would also come in handy for you, should you want a quick way of copying your custom properties to another machine.
- 11: I think creating a new potential child property is a really good idea. Done.
- 12: 11 fixes most of the problems in 12. I have also finally conceded, having thought about your usage scenarios and found them convincing, and implemented support for commands on parent nodes: delete and install in the saved tree; and uninstall in the installed tree. In each case, the command is performed on all of the eligible children in the subtree under the selected node. Because users may sometimes be surprised by what will and won't be operated on, the user is told what the command targets will be, and asked to confirm the operation.
- 13: This was implemented a version or so back. The background of properties in the saved tree that have also been installed should be green. However, you may not have seen it because there was a bug where if a property has a DisplayName, then the highlight did not appear in the saved tree after the property was installed until the whole app was restarted (strange but true!).
Dijji
philippehawi
For fields that have a checkbox, to show the help text, you have to check the box. Is there an easier way to show the help text without modifying the field? Clicking on the name of the field? Or changing the checkbox to a true/false drop list, and showing the help text when the user open the list? This is just a personal preference. I wouldn't like to change the value of a field just to show its help text.
Installed panel: clicking on whitespace to clear selection? Decided not to do that?
ColumnIndexType: help text needs attention at the end.
isGroup: help text reads "A property description with IsGroup="true" should specify a , otherwise it isn't a useful property". Specify a what? It is like that in the Microsoft docs. I couldn't tell what they meant to say.
isTreeProperty: no explanation in MS docs. Current help text says: Whether this is a tree property. Not sure what this means... If you understand what this field is, could you add a clear description?
SearchRawValue: same as above.
The editor panel looks crammed vertically. The drop list of EditControl barely fits. I suggest adding some space below the last field, and the user can just scroll down in the editor panel.
EditControl: typo in the last line of help. "late" should be "later."
Weird issues when saving and deleting. I'll try my best to explain what happened. This was the first property i'm editing. No saved properties yet. I clicked on save. The prop got saved, but a message box appeared asking if i want to discard changes. I chose no. Then i went to the saved panel. Right clicking on the property resulted in the same message. I had to discard changes (there weren't any changes though) to be able to delete it. I tried reproducing this behavior but i couldn't. But then this happened again when i created a new set of properties. Will try to better understand when this is happening. But what i am sure of is that when this message appears, there definitely aren't any changes to be discarded.
I created the following property: Custom.Documents.Journal. Context menu of Journal has the 3 options available. For Documents, only export is available. What if I want to delete (or even install) all properties under Documents? For Custom, nothing is available (again, i might want to install or delete everything in that category). Does it even make sense to export anything that's not in the lowest level of the tree? The exported propdesc of Custom.Documents has information for Custom.Documents.Journal. I don't think Custom.Documents should have a propdesc in the first place.
When i select Documents, i expected the editor to show a blank new property with the name Custom.Documents, which can not be saved obviously, where i would add something to the name (e.g., .Year). Is that unreasonable or not an expected behavior? Anyway, after i create Year and save it (now i have in the saved list Custom.Documents.Journal and Custom.Documents.Year), if i click on Year then on Documents, the editor displays the details of Year. If i click on Journal then Documents, the editor displays the details of Journal. I think there's something to be addressed there.
Having created Custom.Documents.Journal and installed it (now the install button is disabled), i create Custom.Videos and save it. The install button is enabled. I then click on Custom.Documents and the install button is still enabled. I then click on Custom.Documents.Journal, the install button gets disabled, and stays disabled when i select Custom.Documents. So in essence, moving from a non-installed property to an installed property disables the install button (correct), but moving from a non-installed property to the group header of an installed property does not disable the install button (incorrect, given the way things are right now, which is the installed button always disabled for group headers; i argue that if there are properties yet to be installed, the user should be able to install them all through their group header).
Still no indication of which saved properties are installed in the saved panel. Is that something you decided not to do?
This is where I stopped testing. I have deadlines but I'll keep testing whenever I can and report back. Hopefully, everything will be thoroughly tested by end of next week.