[udig-devel] The Table View, previously known as Selection View

[Myron Wu]

I meant to send this out earlier, but better late than never....

The Selection View is obviously in a state of flux and we need to discuss  
some things for it to move forward.  So we'll start with where it's at now  
(outstanding bugs excluded for brevity):

1.)  It's been renamed to Table View to better reflect what it actually  
does at the moment; it will always show all features in a layer regardless  
of what's currently selected.
2.)  It only shows the features of the topmost selected layer when there's  
more than one layer selected.
3.)  There's no sorting at the moment and it displays features in whatever  
order they come in from a given FeatureStore.

Technical:

1.)  It's currently implemented with a Tree and TreeViewer through  
net.refractions.udig.ui.FeatureTableControl (reason why in a sec).
2.)  For increased responsiveness, we have it loading features into the  
view in a separate thread through a DeferredTreeContentManager  
+ TreeViewer.  See http://www.ji.co.za/unplugged/?p=34 .


Some questions we need to resolve for it to move forward:

1.)  How should we deal with multiple layers?  Seperate tables?  Groupings  
within a single table?  etc.
2.)  How should we deal with the current selection?  Highlighting?   
Seperate tables or groupings again?

Technical:

1.)  Does it make sense to keep this as a Tree + TreeViewer?  This depends  
on what we do about responsiveness and how we answer the two questions  
above.
1.1.)  For responsiveness, I think we have a couple options.  What we have  
now is less than ideal since it loads all features no matter what, which  
is inefficient.  We can switch to an SWT.VIRTUAL table or tree (added in  
3.2M5), to load only features currently seen in the view.  Anything else  
we can do here?


Cheers,

Myron