Hour Template Assignment questions/suggestions

  1. The Hour Template Assignments dialog is accessed by clicking Template Hour Assignments… in the menu.
    Er … somewhat inconsistent terminology (and looks silly in a manual! ;)).
    And actually, Manage Hour Templates… should just be Hour Templates… (‘management’ is implied in the resulting dialog ;)). But I digress …

  2. The H.T.A dialog is resizable, which is good. BUT it can be resized vertically, which is bad. Also, the grid cells do not resize with the dialog, which is also bad: it would be very helpful if they DID resize.

  3. OK, I admit it: I just cannot work out why some templates are shown in a red font in the cell, while others are shown in green font. Is there any significance to the colours, or is it just that each template is shown in a different font colour so you can easily tell them apart? (It doesn’t seem to depend on number of items, or whether the tmeplate contains any fixed? or Optional? items, as far as I can tell?)

  4. The Hours column shows just 0 … 23 (cf. the ‘Go To’ dialog, which shows 0:00 … 23:00). I think it should show the Hours as 0:00 to 23:00—it just looks more ‘correct’ somehow. I also think that the ‘header’ cells would look better if they were ‘flat’ rather than looking like buttons (because clicking them does nothing): also cf. the ‘Go To’ dialog.

    BFN
    CAD

Thanks for your comments.

Unlike most of the other tables/grids, this dialog does not use the Virtual Treeview component, but Delphi’s TStringGrid, which was easier to use in this case, but which doesn’t support as much visual customization.

The red/green/etc. colors are indeed only to give a visual feedback of the selected template. Perhaps it would even look nicer if it was black text on a colored background.

After working with this a little more, yes: a coloured background WOULD work better than coloured text. It also appears that some colours get re-used after maybe six or seven different templates are placed: I think you need to use at least 14 different colours before you re-use any of them.

And … the fixed-width columns are becoming really irritating. Even a fairly short template name like Breakfast (weekend) is truncated when displayed in the Hour Template Assignment grid. If a grid which resizes with the dialog isn’t possible right now, even a ToolTip on the cells would be a big help!

BFN
CAD

I note that in B875, the columns in the grid in this dialog are still not resizable.

It really would be good if the columns could be resized when the dialog is resized horizontally.

Pretty please with sugar icing on. ;D

Thanks in advance.

BFN
CAD

I would second the request. It would be nice to have wider text boxes so that the names weren’t truncated.

Best Rergards, Alec M.

I’m VERY happy to see that this has been fixed in b880.

Even better ;D would be to have a FIXED height (VERTICAL resizing of this dialog makes no sense).

BFN
CAD

Torben, did you decide not to use a coloured background (instead of changing text colour) in the Hour Template Assignment dialog, or has this just been pushed down your ‘to-do’ list?

I guess the latter; I’m thinking of the, er, MAL here (unfortunate acronym in English, isn’t it?). :wink:

BFN
CAD

The Hour Template Assignment grid uses a different visual control (TStringGrid vs. TVirtualStringTree aka Virtual Treeview). This is necessary because Virtual Treeview does not support selecting arbitrary regions in grid mode (you can only select entire rows). On the other hand, TStringGrid does not support changing the background color of individual rows. Hence the use of font colors.

OK, no problem. :slight_smile:

BFN
CAD