Dimensions?

[Robert Graham Merkel]

Clark Jones writes:
 > Robert Graham Merkel wrote:
 > > 
 > > Christopher Browne writes:
 > >  > On Wed, 27 Sep 2000 10:46:27 +1000, the world broke into rejoicing as
 > [...]
 > >  > ... And in perhaps-overly-brief response to the multiply-expressed
 > >  > question,
 > >  >   "What if it's not a tree?"
 > [...]
 > > As for the user interface question, ideas are rolling around in the
 > > back of the head, but you're right, it is *nasty*.
 > 
 > Well, I have a thought on this, but first let me explain, briefly, my
 > situation:  I have two vehicles, a pickup and an RV, and so have things
 > like
 > 
 > auto:pickup:insurance
 > auto:pickup:repairs
 > auto:pickup:taxes
 > auto:RV:insurance
 > auto:RV:repairs
 > auto:RV:taxes
 > 
 > and I have
 > 
 > home:insurance
 > home:maintenance
 > home:taxes:irrigation_district
 > home:taxes:realestate
 > 
 > and so on.
 > 
 > One of the reports that I'd like to see would group together all of the
 > related stuff across the vehicles (and ignore anything related to home),
 > while another report would say, in essence, here's what I've spent on
 > insurance this year, and here's what I've spent on taxes, and so on.
 > 
 > Anyway, as for the [ab]user interface, I've seen several instances around
 > of two windows where "here's what's currently selected for inclusion" and
 > "these items are not currently included" -- you click on one to highlight
 > it, and then click on the arrow that's between the two columns to move it.
 > 
A two-column type setup is the sort of thing I had in mind.  However, 
what you need to be able to do is build a *tree* for a report to
summarise things into.

 > What I would envision is that when you're setting up/modifying a report,
 > you would create new "catagory" (or some appropriate word) (or possibly
 > select an existing one if modifying an existing report) and then you
 > would get the "two column" included/not included display described in the
 > previous paragraph.  (We might want to include a "check box" that the user
 > could check to only allow a given account to only appear on one catagory,
 > and possibly also a choice between "ignore unselected accounts"/"report
 > unselected accounts as an error"/"put unselected accounts into a default
 > 'misc.' catagory".)
 > 
 > I think that such a user interface could be made both sufficiently general
 > as to satisfy the vast majority of people's needs, and is also relatively
 > intuitive if the GUI is set up correctly.
 > 
 > There are, of course, many "implementation details", such as the need to
 > allow the user to have multiple reports set up, an easy/intuitive way of
 > selecting things like "date ranges" (including an "all before"!), what to
 > do about new accounts that have been created since the last time the report
 > was run, just how we represent the report on disk, and so on.  Also, when
 > selecting accounts, we'd want to (eventually) be able to select multiple
 > accounts (with shift lmb and control lmb), and maybe even a way to "select
 > accounts based on a regular expression" (after all, this _IS_ a "Unix-like"
 > OS :-).
 > 
 > Remember, a conclusion is where you got tired of thinking -- this is my
 > conclusion.  :-)
 
Yep.  My thoughts are along similar lines.  This should probably be
firmed up into a proposal, somwhere in the not too distant future.  
ATM I'm trying to make guppi graphs display from GnuCash.  
I should have a simple demo ready soon :)

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Robert Merkel	                           rgmerk@mira.net

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