[Freeciv-Dev] Re: (PR#949) city report fields don't sort well

[Christian Knoke <chrisk@xxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Nov 28, 2002 at 10:33:42PM -0800, Jason Short via RT wrote:
> 
> [jdorje - Sat Nov 16 22:26:58 2002]:
> 
> > This patch provides what I consider the best features of Raimar's and
> > Christian's patches, to implement a simple method of field sorting.
> 
> Here is a new patch with an important bugfix.
> 
> If there are any better ideas/patches for a solution to the immediate
> problem, I would like to hear them.  But it should (1) be simple! and
> (2) separate the non-gui-specific code into cityrepdata.c.

Thank you for your patch, which I tried with HEAD CVS.

Is this meant for stable CVS as well? Then it's ok so far, for HEAD
I have some issues:

The good thing is that I can have even multiple ranked sorting, when
I sort for the second criteria first, and the first second, by clicking
on the appropriate column headers.

The bad thing: I can't sort the numbers in the project column at all
(my patch was clearly superior in this).

Column width: The narrow (one number) columns suffer the problem
that you don't know what they contain (because the column header
is only 1 letter or so), or, the are too wide, using up neccessarely
wanted space, is the header is more explanatory. So the city report
becomes even more cryptic than it is now.

Possible solutions: 1) two independent lines of column headers like
this:

--------------------------------------------
    |    Workers    | 
--------------------------------------------
    | H | C | U | A |
--------------------------------------------
    | 0 | 4 | 0 | 0 |

2) Tool tips for the column headers

If the column headers were more explanatory, you might even choose to
remove the combined columns (F/P/T) at all.

I want to point out, that as long as you have these combined columns,
you could offer a sorting method for them as well (8-:

I couldn't find out what the numbers stand for in the Best attack / Defense
coulmns: 5/3/-  except the first column which is obviously the A value.
Tool tips would help here, too.

Last thing is the plus sign the Gold numbers have. I feel it's irritating.

Christian

-- 
Christian Knoke     * * *      http://www.enter.de/~c.knoke/
* * * * * * * * *  Ceterum censeo Microsoft esse dividendum.