schooltool-developers team mailing list archive

[Tom Hoffman <tom.hoffman@xxxxxxxxx>]

I should probably put in perspective how much I and where I imagine us
using jquery dialogs in or redesign.

This is not "javascript good, page reloads bad" everywhere.

And in particular, the examples which tend to leap to mind first "add
person" "add course" etc. are probably NOT where we'll end up using
modal (and other) dialogs, or at least they aren't the lowest hanging
fruit.  Particularly when there are lots of fields.  Or when you want
to confirm creating or editing an important object by allowing the
user to see the object view immediately.

What I'm thinking of is more is awkward points in the interface.  Like
when you want to do what seems like a simple little change in
SchoolTool that actually leads you to a form which is contained by a
completely different object (which the user doesn't care about) and
perhaps displays completely irrelevant action buttons, and getting
back to where you came from isn't obvious or relies on some hack.

In theory I'd have a specific example here, but hopefully you know the
kind of thing I'm talking about.

Another example is fill-down, which Alan and I were discussing last
night.  Instead of always having a blank row at the top of the
gradebook, "Fill down" should be a choice in the column menu, which
brings up a simple js dialog to enter the number you want to fill
down.

We'll have to make some decisions about how much we want to use js
dialogs for confirmations.  I'm not sure how much is too much there.

Just my thinking at the moment...

--Tom