Re: [Plastic-devs] Select or show colums message
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From: B W. <s05...@sm...> - 2006-07-19 14:49:51
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Hi, Bob, John and myself were discussing the showCols message this morning and we decided that it would make sense to have a general message message for selecting columns as well as more specific messages such as for plotting graphs based on those columns. Personally I see the general purpose message as being passive; i.e. it can be used to tell other applications which columns the user is currently interested in, but it doesn't say what to do with them. This can be useful when dealing with tables with large numbers of columns where there is insufficient space on the screen to display their names properly and/or they are in a different order. Plot messages, on the other hand, actually tell the application to do something with the data. While it would be easy enough to send the showCols message and then have the user manually click on a "visualise" button in the other application, what happens if the user does not want to change which columns they had selected just to do a quick plot? On the flip side: for applications that take a lot of time and resources to generate a graph it would make sense that they only do so when they receive messages that specifically ask for a plot. Sound, Brian |