[Freeciv-Dev] (PR#2607)

["Jason Short via RT" <rt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Although PR#949 has been resolved, the city report field sorting still
leaves something to be desired.

From the previous discussion:


What we need to decide is what behavior we want.  What should the city
list provide?  Are there different options?  Then we can think about a
way to implement it for all GUIs.  It may not be possible for all
clients to implement the same system, but with a well-designed system
they should all be able to have similar behavior.

> 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.

Yes, the individual columns are more confusing than the combined columns
(e.g., F/P/T).

> Possible solutions: 1) two independent lines of column headers like
> this:
>
> --------------------------------------------
>     |    Workers    |
> --------------------------------------------
>     | H | C | U | A |
> --------------------------------------------
>     | 0 | 4 | 0 | 0 |

This actually looks like a great interface.  But I doubt it is (easily)
possible in all GUIs, particularly GTK.

> 2) Tool tips for the column headers

I don't think that's possible in GTK.

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

Yes, the above system could easily replace the F/P/T.  It puts the
columns into groups.

But it is questionable whether a particular GUI can implement this.  If
it can't, what should it do instead?

One issue is whether the groups have to be disabled/enabled as a group,
or whether it's possible to enable individual columns in the group.

> 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-:

Yeah, but that takes a lot of code and doesn't offer the full
functionality.  And without thinking about the interface ahead of time,
it is likely to be very counterintuitive under some GUIs.  For instance
gui-gtk and gui-gtk-2.0 have a very different interface for sorting
columns.


jason