Re: [lmi] product editor patch

[Greg Chicares]

On 2008-02-25 20:52Z, Vadim Zeitlin wrote:
> On Mon, 25 Feb 2008 20:46:05 +0000 Greg Chicares <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> GC> If you want to implement a dynamically word-wrapping wxStaticText
> GC> in wx, then please go right ahead.
> 
>  There is already wxStaticText::Wrap() but it's not ideal.

If you want to work on an ideal implementation, I'd welcome
that; I'm sure we'd find a use for it.

> GC> As for wxTextCtrl, we certainly don't want this to be editable in
> GC> fact, so I was thinking that a read-only wxTextCtrl would be just
> GC> perfect. Do you see a concrete or user-observable disadvantage?
> 
>  I agree that there is not much to be said about them and it's definitely
> useful to use a read-only wxTextCtrl instead of wxStaticText if you want to
> allow the user to copy the text. However this doesn't seem to be the case
> here (why would you want to copy the labels?) and having a cursor appear in
> the labels is IMO very unusual and could be surprising to the user. The
> fact that when you double click (or click and drag but this is harder to do
> accidentally) the control a word is selected can be considered a
> disadvantage too.

Okay, thanks for the explanation.

What do you think would be the best approach here? I think a
read-only text control might be best, despite those issues,
because someday I'd like to add some more fields that really
ought to be read-only but copyable. For instance, it'd be
nice to have a field indicating when and by whom an entity's
contents were last modified. If it seems to have the wrong
value, I can reply thus to an error report from a user:
  "You said the policy fee is $5, but in my copy I see the
  correct value, $3, last updated 2008-02-03T12:34Z. What
  does the last-modified-date field on your copy say? (You
  can copy it and paste it.)"
Sure, I could ask for a screenshot, but experience shows
that I might get a half-megabyte BMP, or a huge PDF. And if
one information-bearing read-only control is copyable, then
it's probably good to use the same control type for others.