Re: File selector talk writeup

[Thomas Leonard <tal00r ecs soton ac uk>]

On Wed, Feb 12, 2003 at 12:23:59PM -0500, Owen Taylor wrote:
> http://people.redhat.com/otaylor/fosdem2003/file-selector.html
> 
> Has a writeup of the talk I gave on Sunday at FOSDEM.
> 
> Certainly still lots of open questions and I definitely don't make any
> concrete proposal as to what the user interface should look like, but
> I've tried to:
> 
>  - List the relevant issues
>  - Propose a direction for how desktop integration
>    should work.
>  - Sketch out in some concrete detail what I think the 
>    API should look like.

Well, I was about to complain about not being mentioned again, but I see
ROX is used in an example :-) If you want some screenshots, there are some
here:

	http://rox.sourceforge.net/archive.php3
	http://rox.sourceforge.net/edit.php3
	http://rox.sourceforge.net/tutor_saving.php3

That last page also includes a tutorial showing the current (python) API
to our save box.

API-wise, the most important features for DnD saving are:

- Notification of when the save finishes (so the data can be sent to the
  remove machine / application).

- A separation between where the file is actually saved and where (and
  whether) the application should report it as saved and mark it
  unmodified.

Some examples might make it clearer:

Case 1 (normal save):

	App->GTK: Save a file, default name TextFile.
	GTK->App: Save it to ~/MyFile.
	App->GTK: Done.
	GTK->App: Data is safely saved as ~/MyFile.

Case 2 (saving to remote machine):

	App->GTK: Save a file, default name TextFile.
	GTK->App: Save it to /tmp/foo1234
	App->GTK: Done.
	GTK->App: Data is safely saved as file://some.host/path/TextFile

Case 3 (saving to another application):

	App->GTK: Save a file, default name TextFile.
	GTK->App: Save it to /tmp/foo1234
	App->GTK: Done.

This all assumes using a temporary file for transfers. In python, we use
stream objects, but I guess people don't want to make this so ROX-biased,
and the tmp-file solution works well enough for us.

Is this / could this be considered?


-- 
Thomas Leonard			http://rox.sourceforge.net
tal00r ecs soton ac uk		tal197 users sourceforge net
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