RE: How to change the order of repeat-items?

Raman,

> The idea of putting sort attrs on the ui layer is enticing, 
> but I am afraid it will run into a wall fairly quickly.

I disagree ;)

As you know -- since you are a strong advocate for it -- there are many
situations where the UI does not *directly* reflect the model. For example,
take xf:select1; its purpose is for the user to choose an item from a list,
but it is possible for the list to not be 'in view', even though the list is
obviously in the model. The list might be limited because the author has
used:

  @appearance="minimal"

or it might be limited because the user has collapsed a node in a tree, or
whatever.

Other examples would be the use of date pickers to both select and render
dates, check-boxes that look nothing like the word 'true' or 'false', colour
pickers that obviously don't look like #ab7f34, a number like "100" stored
in the model but rendered as "$100.00", and so on.

So, my view is that *some* (not all) of the use cases for sorting fall into
this domain -- the user might be able to control them and the author might
be able to hint at them, but either way, the model doesn't care. (To put it
in terms of the MVC architecture, we are simply allowing the creation of an
ordered 'view' of a set of nodes, without touching the underlying nodes.)


I would say that the sortable columns of email or contacts falls into the
category of a 'user sort' -- this can be done with no mark-up at all, since
it's just a more complex version of the button next to a drop-box that shows
you the list of options, and is not under the control of XForms, but under
the control of the user agent.

In the category of an 'author-hint sort' would be the rendering of the
selections in a selection list; the names of the countries would be in one
order in one language, and in another order in another language, for
example.

And in the category of a 'model sort' might be the list of items in a
flowchart, since in this case the order in the model really does matter.

The 'model sort' is more accurately a proper re-ordering of nodes, that
should be permanent, and would therefore be achieved through an action or
extension function. The second one is more like a 'filter' -- a different
'view' on the same underlying nodes, but with those nodes left completely
intact.

Regards,

Mark


Mark Birbeck
CEO
x-port.net Ltd.

e: Mark.Birbeck@x-port.net
t: +44 (0) 20 7689 9232
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Received on Monday, 18 April 2005 19:26:46 UTC