Quote:
Originally Posted by Doitsu
Originally Posted by KevinH View Post
3. How to deal with non-modal dialogs like Search Editor / SpellCheck, Edit TOC, Reports, Edit Metadata, etc? Should we wait until these dialogs are closed by the user before proceeding to the next command in the automate list?
IMHO, it doesn't make sense to automate those tasks anyway.
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I was wondering about that.
The only advantage I could see to supporting dialog based tools is to have an automate list end with one of those but not wait for completion as using any of them requires significant user interaction.
I did some looking and EditMetadata, Generate Table of Contents, and Edit Table of Contents appear to be fully modal so progress will block until they are closed anyway.
And Create HTML Table of Contents, Spellcheck, Saved Searches (F&R) and Reports are fully non-modal (progress will not block unless we wait for them to close) and you can leave them to edit inside the ebook at will using other Sigil features.
Furthermore, closing them is not needed to signify you are done with them as they may remain open until you use them next.
So it is a big question as to what value automating these dialog based tools would be anyway outside of ending in one of them to save a single keystroke shortcut, icon press, or menu click.
Given how flexible plugins are a lot of more complex conditionalized changes can be made including very advanced replacements in a plugin if needed.
So how in general do we deal with these dialog tools that require lots of input from the user itself to happen?
Do we try to automate them and if so to what benefit?
Are they even needed given that plugins and saved searches on groups can be done and run easily with just a few clicks/keystrokes/icons.
Open to any thoughts as to if/why they should be supported and how they will benefit people specifically.
I am starting to agree with Doitsu does here but would like to hear from others as well.