Re: [xwiki-users] [xwiki-devs] [Proposal] Selective Export UI

Hi Caty, I really apologize in advance for looking at this so late and also for my upcoming comments.... do not feel hurt please, but I do not feel that this interface will provide the nice export functionality we expect. First, here is a resume of my main remarks: - You need a big, large screen to see it properly, and at the same time, everything is small and concentrate. - There are too many choices at the same time, and this cause a real excess of complexity - Navigation in the list of document, and filtering, are absolutely different to what the user is accustomed to with LiveTable - Scalability issue increase the complexity in the document list, and choice of export format will not scale easily - Some export options (in the format box) change the list of document that will be exported after your initial choice Let me now review this in more details. 1) Screen size and complexity Putting together the 3 parts of this interface (full list, selected list and export options) make it complex and cluttered. IMO, there isn't several way to solve this. Each part should be in a separate screen. This will both decrease complexity, and allow more flexibility for composing each screen. These screens could than be linked together in a wizard like interface (Back/Next), and a direct access could also be provided using tabs or similar control. These tabs should also show the normal path of actions. 2) List of documents and scalability IMO, we should inspire the list of document from the livetable (not the tree) actually in AllDocs. We need to have it improved (also in AllDocs), but keeping the same look and feel between both of them will obviously helps both users and developers. The livetable in AllDocs already solve the scalability problem nicely, and users will be accustomed to it. What should be improved (in both place) ? - Allow filters on document contents or using the tagcloud. This will provide a mix with the search feature and the tag feature, but in a filter way (without sorting by relevance) - Allow customizing columns, since we might want to choose document based on creation date, modification date, authors, creators, presence of attachements, ... and not all of them could be proposed at once - Allow displaying hidden documents - Allow small popup document preview ? What should be added for export ? - A display of the selection status, probably near the name, on the left. - To allow user to select whole Space, why not list them in there own row, next to the documents, and provide a "type" filter to list only spaces, document or both. For spaces, the selection box could be three states, showing partially selected space. - "Add/remove all displayed item", "add/remove the whole filtered list", should be proposed for easy large selection/deselection. An undo option could be nice to have. 3) List of selected documents / Spaces To stay simple, this list should be very similar to the previous one (and influenced by the column customarily displayed in the previous step by the user). This is in fact a filtered view on the selection status. I would not mix it with the previous one, to provide a clear step by step way and a slightly different interface : - The selection status should be replace by a removal button. - Some external button should allow: - "Add Children" which will add one level of children of all selected page to the list - "Add All Children" which will add all children of selected page recursively to the list - "Add Linked Pages" which will add pages linked from currently selected page to the list - "Add All Linked Page" which will add pages linked from currently selected page recursively to the list - "Undo last addition" using one of the previous buttons which will return the list to its previous state - "Save current selection" which will allow saving the current selection for later use/reuse If the export contains unselected children pages, or unselected linked pages. It may be useful to warn the user of that situation on this screen. 4) Export options This last screen should allow the selection of the export format from a free list. After a deep refactoring, we should be able to easily implement new export format (using components) and this list of format should be dynamic. Obviously, the format options will be displayed depending of the chosen format (including custom interface by custom formats). But, these options should not change the list of exported pages in any way, this is confusing. 5) What about the hierarchical views IMO, we should stay away from them as much as we can since trees of large sets have a serious scalability issue (I means for the user, not only the computer). I have already provide some hints on how to provide children and link inclusion, but may be we can go one step further with reasonable complexity. For each rows of both table describe above, we may have several expanding box (a "small" lightbox), that shows: - the list of direct children of the page/space - the list of all children of the page taken recursively - the list of linked page from the page - the list of all linked page from the page taken recursively These boxes will display a similar list to the current one (without further expanding boxes), allowing review/selection of additional pages Well, there is probably many adjustment that could be needed on the way to this interface, and I hope my remarks will be the source of inspiration for an even better solution. Thanks to those who have read me, this is a little bit long... I know. Denis On Mon, Jun 21, 2010 at 21:55, Ecaterina Valica <valicac(a)gmail.com> wrote: -- Denis Gervalle SOFTEC sa - CEO eGuilde sarl - CTO