[Closed] Please help beta test calibre 7

[un_pogaz]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

Doh, I assumed a ✔ in Manage Categories was a signal that a note for the item existed, for some explicable reason it didn't twig that I could tab to the cell and press F2 to enter/edit the item's note (just as I can for a link)

For info, a first implementation used buttons that was more explicite button, but drop du to perfomance issue.

To Kovid, that was possible to implemente a unique button as a cell (button of we modified properties dynamically according to the note it represents), or that is still to much bad regardless the perfomance?

[chaley]

Originally Posted by un_pogaz

To Kovid, that was possible to implemente a unique button as a cell (button of we modified properties dynamically according to the note it represents), or that is still to much bad regardless the perfomance?

There were two performance problems:

• creating many thousand pushbuttons in Qt is slow. Each cellWidget had 3. A user-provided test library had 36,000 author rows, or 100,000 buttons.
• cellWidgets are themselves very slow. I had read about that problem when doing the initial implementation but didn't test with a library big enough to run into the problem. Doing the beta fixed that oversight.

The performance problems can in theory be eliminated by using a styledItemDelegate instead of cellWidgets and drawing the buttons instead of creating button widgets. However, that seems to require writing the delegate in C++, which requires rebuilding calibre's binary for every test. This wasn't something I wanted to try.

Kovid's "checkbox" solution is performant, purely in python, and easy to understand. With a context menu offering create/edit, delete, import, and export (which exists) it works well enough.

[kovidgoyal]

yeah i dont think using a cell widget is workable with large libraries. The "right" way to fix this if not use QTableItems and instead use a proper model with caching. And then use a styled delegate that draws its buttons based on the data in the model for the current cell. And then it will have to handle mouse events and so on, its a lot of work. I think the checkmark is a reasonable compromise. One can add a tooltip to it saying press f2 to edit or whatever.

@charles: I think a styled delegate would be doable in python but given that it has to handle events and state and so on it will be a lot of work

[chaley]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

One can add a tooltip to it saying press f2 to edit or whatever.

Tooltips in QTableWidgets don't work unless one implements mouse tracking. Switching to model/view would fix that, but ...

Another way to "fix" this is to use an "is editable" icon, perhaps edit_input.png. It could go on non-edited cells, just as the "Edited" (quill) icon goes on edited cells. Something like this:


I don't feel strongly one way or the other.

[kovidgoyal]

isnt turning on mouse tracking just a one line change? I'm not very fond of the icon it really clutters up the table since its there on every cell.

[chaley]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

isnt turning on mouse tracking just a one line change?

TBH I don't know. I thought I would also need to detect that the mouse is hovering in the table cell, which isn't quite so easy.

I'm not very fond of the icon it really clutters up the table since its there on every cell.

I agree. Personally I would leave it as it is.

[kovidgoyal]

It should just require calling self.setMouseTracking() but the bad part is that since we arent using a model we would have to call settooltip on every cell which is a huge amount of largely useless CPU work.

[chaley]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

Suggestion: instead of presenting a list of category item values in the Manage categories drop down, could a checkbox option be added at the top of the Category editor (xxxxxx) dialogue — "Only show items for the selected book(s)". If multiple books is a bridge too far, make it 'selected book' and disable the option if multiple books are selected.

I thought about this for a while, trying and failing to figure out why it would be better than showing the items in Manage categories. Then it hit me -- if you are using the cover grid then there is no way to select the column and therefore no way to see the item values in the menu. Adding the selected books restriction into the dialogs works around that problem.

This is what I submitted to Kovid, leaving Manage categories showing the items if it can.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by chaley

This is what I submitted to Kovid, leaving Manage categories showing the items if it can.

Suggestions :

• replace the ✔ with a pencil to match what's in Book Details;
• put tooltips in the Category editor headers - as per the Book list.

BR

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by chaley

I thought about this for a while, trying and failing to figure out why it would be better than showing the items in Manage categories. Then it hit me -- if you are using the cover grid then there is no way to select the column and therefore no way to see the item values in the menu. Adding the selected books restriction into the dialogs works around that problem.

I don't use the cover grid.

I use the Manage [category] items dialogue (via Shift+F2 in the book list) to add new category items and apply category items to books. For me it is significantly less error prone that adding and selecting in line. I would normally know I wanted to attach a note to a category item when I added it, which is why I started this conversation there.

BR

[chaley]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

Suggestions :

• replace the ✔ with a pencil to match what's in Book Details;

The check mark is a character, which permits showing both the "edited" icon and the check mark. Only one icon can be applied to a cell, so if we use the pencil icon then we can't use the edited icon. The edited icon can't replace the checkmark because a deleted note is edited with no check. I suppose that someone could invent a set of icons to indicate the 4 states (empty not edited, empty edited, exists not edited, exists edited), but that is neither something I am good at nor want to do. Perhaps someone else is willing to take it on.

• put tooltips in the Category editor headers - as per the Book list.

BR

Headers in the Qt table widget don't support tooltips. As Kovid said a bit back, getting tooltips really requires switching to the equivalent model/view implementation as used for the book list, which is a huge amount of work.

[BetterRed]

I had this in mind: ✏️ — code point: U+270F U+FE0F. But now I know the Note cells are editable, for me it's moot.

And if I could, I'd move the Count and Was columns after Link and Note - then I wouldn't have to navigate through them to get at the editable cells.

BR

[ownedbycats]

Possible Qt weirdness: I noticed in various plugin dialogs that contain a table ("Edit List" in Reading List, "Show Reading Position Changes" in Kobo Utilities), the widths of the columns repeatedly get reset. I don't recall this happening before, can anyone else confirm?

[un_pogaz]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

I had this in mind: ✏️ — code point: U+270F U+FE0F. But now I know the Note cells are editable, for me it's moot.

Oh, nice idea
*testing*
[attached image]

weellll... not really conclusive.


I still think there's a good idea there, but to get a satisfactory result, we'd have to draw our own pencil and add it to calibreSymbols.otf font. And after all, the pencil is already the symbol for note elsewhere.
But like your say, detail when we know.

Also, after a little further testing, I identified that it was the Variation Selector U+FE0F that wasn't identified (probably on Qt side), so the character U+270F was read raw ✏ (bonus ✎ U+270E, ✐ U+2710)

[kovidgoyal]

Yes it would require the special font as otherwise we hav eno idea what kind of pencil it will look like. And that font would need to be set on every notes cell. Not really worth it for pencil over checkmark.