Re: [Plastic-devs] Select or show colums message

[B W. <s05...@sm...>]

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