RE: [Foa-devel] Welcome Ben !

[Giannetti, F. <Fab...@hp...>]

Hi John,
	I'm working on the wizard and I was thinking to do something like:
when you select the wizard button you have the possibility to select a
starting node from the XML tree which you want to style.
Now there is a simple way and an hard one to implement this wizard, let's
start from the simple one :-)
When the author select a node from the content tree such as B:

Root
  |- A
     |-[B] selected
     |  |-C
     |  |-C
     |  |-C
     |-D
  ...

He can also decide which kind of brick apply among the available ones. This
sub-tree can, for instance, easily transformed into a list. The appropriate
selection of the brick will be left to the author's choice.

The second option, the toughest one, is to create choices, when the starting
element has been selected, that are suitable with the available bricks (I
try to be a little bit clear with an example ...)
Let's imagine to have an XML content tree like this:

Root
  |- A
     |-[B] selected
     |  |-C
     |  | |-D
     |  | |-E
     |  |-C
     |  | |-D
     |  | |-E
     |  |-C
     |    |-D
     |    |-E
     |-F
  ...

Now the sub tree could be style as a SimpleTable Brick (B=table,
C=table-row, D&E=table-cell) or as a Label&BodyList Brick (B=list, C=list
item, D=label, E=body), FOA will have to find out the available possibility.
This could be very difficult and it's not clear for me at the moment how to
implement it and how to stop the algorithm. I can have a nested element
inside D or E that I don't want to style, but for the matching algorithm
this could inficiate the bricks pattern recogniction ...
So, I hope to have some good feedback on this and BTW, we can still go for
the simple version in which is the author responsibility to do the correct
job selecting the most appropriate brick and what we can do is to check if
there are sufficient nesting levels and accept or reject the choice made,
e.g. something like:

Root
  |- A
     |-[B] selected
     |  |-C
     |  |-C
     |  |-C
     |-D
  ...

could not be styled as a SimpleTable because there are only 2 nested levels
(B and C) and for the table are required 3 levels ...

Hope this is clear enough ...
Fabio

> -----Original Message-----
> From: John [mailto:jo...@jm...]
> Sent: Friday, August 30, 2002 4:10 PM
> To: Giannetti, Fabio
> Subject: Re: [Foa-devel] Welcome Ben !
> 
> 
> On Tue, 27 Aug 2002 16:06:20 +0100, Giannetti, Fabio wrote:
> 
> -> John, how the FOA redesign is going ?
> -> I'd like to open again the next steps discussion because I
> think we can
> -> start to think to wizards and new feature for the next
> release.
> 
> Hi Fabio!!!  Welcome back.  I was pulled away from FOA by other
> urgent matters, so the very last thing I was thinking about was
> table wizards.  I wonder if the table wizard from 3.0 can be
> functionally simpler, and it would be nice to have a single
> wizard (from the users point of view, anyway) to do both the
> simple and complex tables.
> 
> I didn't have time to really put down any concrete ideas, but I
> wanted to go back to the FO spec for tables, and see if we could
> construct the most simple wizard that would still allow all
> features.
> 
> John
> 
> 
>