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skiadas / PanthR

Statistics front-end and webserver with R connection
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Drag and drop variable labels #15

Open altermattw opened 11 years ago

altermattw commented 11 years ago

Users should be able to select a variable from a list and then drag it from the list into a window for analysis. What would be the format of these draggable labels? Images? Is there something simpler that would be easy to write text onto but that would restrict interaction to the label and not individual characters in the label?

This would mean that the fields we use for dialogs will not be conventional text boxes in forms, but rather spaces where images can be placed.

In some contexts (e.g., Variable view), we might consider adding a special behavior: When one variable is dropped on top of another variable, we prompt to ask if the user wants to combine the variables in some way, such as computing their mean.

altermattw commented 11 years ago

It may be useful to distinguish between three aspects of variables:

  1. Name. This is the text used to refer to the variable in code. Lots of restrictions on what's acceptable. For example, probably no spaces.
  2. Label. This will be user-specified text that would appear in reports and plots, similar to how SPSS does it.
  3. Icon. This will be a GUI object that can be dragged and dropped onto dialogs, lists, and plots.
altermattw commented 11 years ago

In addition to being able to drag and drop variable labels (e.g., onto a plot), it would be great to be able to drag and drop properties of the variable, such as the mean or standard deviation. Dropping a variable's mean (represented by a small icon within the variable thumbnail, for example) onto a plot would prompt the user to add the mean of that variable across levels of whatever other variables are present, or to draw a horizontal line at the mean of that variable, etc.