Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[MusicHawk]

A view design feature I value in another database product (IBM Lotus Notes) would be quite nice in MC. It's been discussed before, so I'm tossing it back in case it is more feasible now then then.

The problem to be solved is how to view and edit long tag/field values (lots of text and/or List values). I've always bumped into this with music, but now even more trying to use MC for photos and video.

The idea is to show more of a field's content in a view row -- Dynamically resize each row to show ALL the content of each field of that row. Wrap the content of a field when necessary to multiple lines within the column width, and auto-size the row's height to show all the wrapped lines.

The benefit is to show all of a track's data in a view, which usually has lots of screen-space to work with, rather than just in the "tiny" Tag box (only about half my active tag fields show without scrolling the box). And to do this without having to size the view column widths to the max value that might appear, because column wrapping within each row would show it all automatically.

For a column that contains multiple-values (List type), treat each semi-colon as a hard-return and wrap on them. Say "Washington Post March" is given three keywords, "patriotic", "military", "march". Normally these three values display in a view Keywords column as a single line of "patriotic;military;march" or however much fits into the column width. So, to see them all the column must be wide -- and if there are even more List values, the column must be VERY wide.

Instead, have the column auto-wrap List values to this:
patriotic
military
march

This is already how the List values are displayed in the Tag box. However, the Tag window area is fairly small and apparently not resizable, so if more than a few fields are used for tagging they scroll off and it's quite clumsy to see all the tag values.

To keep the view within reasonable bounds, there could be a max-row-lines setting, defaulting to "1" to provide the current view row behavior. The dynamic row-height mode could be implemented via a view checkbox, or by changing the max-row-lines setting from "1" to whatever is desired.

The List field wrapping on-semi-colons could be implicit, or it could be via a new function the user adds to the column expression that converts the semi-colons of a List into hard-returns, then the view design reacts to the hard returns in a field column's values by wrapping them.

I guess an alternative would be to have a detachable, resizable Tag window, but the downside is finding a suitable screen spot to float it.

[rick.ca]

This is a great idea! Most of my movie data is far too long for any sort of single-line columnar display. Standard View is rather useless for this kind of information (I use it in Theater View). This may not be a perfect solution (e.g., I'm still only going to be able to display a bit a lengthy description or review), but it would be a huge improvement. I think it would go nicely with something else I wish for—the ability to lock some columns on the left so they'll stay in place while the the others scroll (like a spreadsheet). This would make horizontal scrolling more practical, in turn making wider column widths possible. Imagine Title and Year columns locked on the left, and being able to scroll to appropriately wide columns (even 70-80 characters for memo fields) for other information. This would be great along with a 5 - 10 max-row-lines setting. It would make things like the starring actors and the first paragraph of a description readily visible, while still being a practical means for displaying multiple movies.

[MusicHawk]

Good suggestion! So we have two ideas that would allow views to be the major way to work with audio/photo/video data:

-- Allow multi-line rows with wrapping column data. Benefit: Columns with long-ish data can be read in full by wrapping it in the column, not truncating it. (And wrap each List value on a new line.)

-- Allow horizontal scroll column locking. Benefit: Scroll among columns with losing visibility of locked left-side columns.

The work on how MC manipulates and displays images (still and video) is wonderful, but needs to be matched by improvements in how it handles text. The focus of MC on video and images is likely to require MUCH longer text chunks. Consider the description length of a typical TV show or movie, for instance -- name, episode, year, rating, plot summary, actors, etc. Consider the amount of data that might be used for a set of family photos -- date, location, event, description/caption, AND all the people in the photo. Lots of text is possible in the current MC14, but darn clumsy to enter, edit, and view. Hence the suggestions...

[GrantDG]

I would like to add a vote for NOT implementing this feature.

Irregularly sized view rows are just an eyesore, and can be confusing (i.e. if the only data that is making the row height greater is off screen)

If you do decide to implement - please make it a configurable option (maybe "Max Row Height" [lines]) - defaulted to 1

[rick.ca]

To keep the view within reasonable bounds, there could be a max-row-lines setting, defaulting to "1" to provide the current view row behavior. The dynamic row-height mode could be implemented via a view checkbox, or by changing the max-row-lines setting from "1" to whatever is desired.