schooltool-developers team mailing list archive

[Tom Hoffman <tom.hoffman@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Jun 30, 2011 at 9:09 AM, Gediminas Paulauskas <menesis@xxxxxx> wrote:
> 2011/6/20 Alan Elkner <aelkner@xxxxxxxxx>:
>> Hey Guys,
>>
>> I got the modal dialog to work for person preferences
>
> I see you together resolved all the issues with preferences dialog...
>
> However, I still do not understand *why* preferences is a modal
> dialog. The options are not related to anything seen on person page,
> it is no problem to go to a normal page and return with Save/Cancel
> buttons. All other links in the sidebar open a page except this one.

Arguably it is a little gratuitous.  I don't see the placement of a
link as being particularly important in terms of whether or not it
opens a modal.  I just don't see that as a standard convention either
way, but maybe I'm missing some of the grammar.

Basically, I see just a few simple cases for jquery dialogs:

1) Small, simple forms.  This is mostly a matter of focus.  I think it
is preferable to gray (blue currently...) out the rest of the
interface and focus the user on a form that otherwise is much smaller
than the page as a whole.

2) Navigational hack.  Basically, if you don't leave the page, you
don't have to figure out how to get back to it, which, as we know, is
sometimes a problem in SchoolTool.

3) Confirmations.  Not that we're going to have many of them.

4) Non-modal informative pop-ups.  We're really not doing these right
now, but one example would be the gradebook.  If you click on a
person's name you don't necessarily want to leave the gradebook
entirely, so a pop-up version of the student info would be nice.

I'm probably forgetting something.

> Moreover, the two preferences are both for the calendar. They should
> be moved there. With a new option for default view
> (daily/weekly/monthly), please :)

Yes, we should do this when we get to calendars.

Thanks Gediminas.

--Tom