Re: GtkFileChooser API work

[Brian Cameron <Brian Cameron Sun COM>]

Sean:

>This could probably done much more nicely so far as UI concerned.  I can
>imagine a user getting confused as to why their OK button is disabled,
>not understand it's because they are outside a particular directory.
>
>Would probably be nicer to just let them pick any directory, and then
>check it after they hit OK - if the selected path is "invalid", then pop
>up a dialog explaining the situation, and pop them back into the filter
>chooser.

I think a better choice would be to provide a drop-down selection
of valid directories and to disallow the user from navigating the file
structure in the normal way.

>In general, tho, it seems a very bad idea to limit write locations. 
>There may very well be a reason the user isn't using a standard location
>(making a backup, for example).

Agreed.  However, it is really annoying that you have to write a custom
FileChooser when you simply want to provide a dialog that allows the
users to select a file in a specific directory.  You are right that
this is perhaps not too common, but it is a situation that does come
up.

Brian

>On Wed, 2003-09-03 at 10:36, Brian Cameron wrote:
>> One thing that I think would be useful would be to allow the
>> programatic specification of which directories can be accessed
>> via the GtkFileChooser dialog.
>> 
>> I was working on a program that was intended to be run as root
>> and for safety purposes, we wanted to restrict the dialog to only
>> allow users to save files to particular directories.  This was
>> to prevent accidental overwrite of any important files, etc.  In
>> the custom filechooser that I implemented, the "OK" button was
>> grayed out if the user navigated to a directory that wasn't in
>> the list of acceptable directories.  This could probably be
>> handled more elegantly, though.
>> 
>> Since the default GtkFileChooser didn't allow a list of acceptable
>> directories to be specified, I had to implement my own custom file
>> chooser.  It seems like this sort of feature would be generally
>> useful for programs that want to restrict the loading/saving of
>> files to/from particular directories (such as a MyDocuments
>> directory), or for selection of files that are always in the
>> same locations - such as those system files which are found
>> in /usr, /etc, or in the user's home directory.
>> 
>> Brian
>> 
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>-- 
>Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>
>AwesomePlay Productions, Inc.
>
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