Hi Marcel,
I posted a screenshot on the website to provide others with a
reference point:
http://dev.objectstyle.org/~andrus/rop-screen.png
1. if there is more than one object returned from fetch or a
relationship, still only one object is displayed (not sure if this
is simply a layout issue?)
The interface isn't entirely intuitive - though its reasonably
effective - if you double click on an object, it will cycle through
the records.
For me the double-click only replaced the relationships, but left the
original (clicked) object unchanged.
Single click on a relationship expands the relationship.
This worked.
2. Object "uniquing" is broken. I.e. if I start from an Artist
object, navigate to a Painting, and then to Painting's Artist, I
get two artists displayed for the same object.
The uniquing works in a different way - the objects on the screen
are both collections of Artists. A query might return 3 Artists
(all displayed in the same cycleable node), one of whom has 2
Paintings. When you navigate to a Painting's Artist, the new object
displayed is a collection of only one Artist, rather than 3, so it
is different.
I figure that if you choose to expand a relationship onwards like
that, you must have a reason to want to see it in another node, so
I haven't stopped it happening.
I see...
Still I'd love us to come up with better representations for (1) and
(2). One way is to think of a collection of objects (be it the
initial fetch result, or a to-many relationship) as a graph node,
same as individual object nodes. This would mean a "collection shape"
should be displayed on screen, with an arrow from the owning object,
and arrows to the "opened" objects. Clicking on a collection may open
a dropdown list of contained objects, so the user can select just one
she cares about at the moment.
If we solve the collection representation issue in one way or the
other, it will become possible to implement unique object display as
well. And object uniquing is certainly something I would like to
preserve. (BTW, in Cayenne internally this is one of the central
concepts).
3. When no results are returned from the query (or relationship),
a square with "null" in it is displayed.
Yes. A more detailed message suggested (or other functionality)?
It depends on how we handle the issues above. I think a collection
shape showing a count of zero would work. For null to-one
relationships maybe show "null" somewhere in the owning object (just
like we show simple property values), or make clickable (non-null)
and non-clickable (null) relationships visually different. Somehow
showing an arrow connecting to null seems wrong.
Does it make sense?
Andrus
