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Bug 2597

Summary:	[Preferences] Preferences should be re-ordered. (1GGYVQ5)
Product:	[Eclipse Project] Platform	Reporter:	Greg Adams <greg_adams>
Component:	UI	Assignee:	Platform-UI-Inbox <Platform-UI-Inbox>
Status:	RESOLVED WONTFIX	QA Contact:
Severity:	enhancement
Priority:	P4	CC:	n.a.edgar, Randy_Giffen, Tod_Creasey
Version:	2.0	Keywords:	investigate, usability
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	All
OS:	Windows All
Whiteboard:

Description Greg Adams

2001-10-10 22:39:34 EDT

id RATLC00002725 Priority: 3
Headline: Preferences should be re-ordered.

Description:
It is not possible to specify a desired order for items in the Preference Dialog.

Steps to reproduce:
As an example, given this set of categories for Preferences: Shapes/Connectors,
General, Model Explorer, Classes/Interfaces
the developer would like to control the order that they are displayed on the Preferences page.

The desired order is:

- General
- Classes/Interfaces
- Model Explorer
- Shapes/Connectors

Specifying this order in the plugin.xml failed to produce the desired ordering.
It is not clear how the items are being sorted or how to change the ordering.

Desired behavior:

A method or mechanism is exposed that allows the developer to specify the order of the list of preference categories.

OTI PR# IBM 1GBCN5F: ITPUI:ALL

NOTES:

GDA (7/16/01 1:21:36 PM)
If we expose this it would be exposed only in subtrees. Plugins must not be allowed
to control the topmost order.

RG (7/16/01 4:44:01 PM)
Plugins don't own their subtree. Anyone can specify the same subtree. The plugin.xml which
will be read first is unpredicatable. Thus we collect all the items in a subtree from
all plugins and sort them alphabetically.

Currently we allow a page to specify a parent category. A solution might be to allow a page
to specify an "order after" category (this category would be a sibling). All pages in a subtree without
an "order after" category would be sorted alphabetically. Pages with an "order after" category would
then be inserted after their specified category. Any conflicts (>1 page with the same "order after" category)
would be resolved by alphabetical ordering.

It is important that page ordering be deterministic independent of plugin.xml read order.

Comment 1 DJ Houghton

2001-10-29 19:03:24 EST

PRODUCT VERSION:
0.9
@RATL-0.9

Comment 2 Kevin Haaland

2002-02-07 20:09:36 EST

Defer for 2.0

Comment 3 Randy Giffen

2002-08-08 12:27:58 EDT

Reopen to investigate

Comment 4 Tod Creasey

2002-08-09 10:30:57 EDT

This could be done with a sorting algorithm that sorts alphbetically by default 
and could optionally allow the ordering.

However doing this would break the consistency of the UI - a lot of work in 2.0 
was done to be sure that everything sorted the same and this might just be too 
confusing for a user.

Comment 5 Tod Creasey

2002-08-21 11:35:29 EDT

This should also be looked at byt the usability team in conjunction with the 
planned work for ordering of menu items.

Comment 6 Tod Creasey

2002-08-26 11:43:33 EDT

*** Bug 2895 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 7 Tod Creasey

2006-06-22 08:33:57 EDT

There are currently no plans to work on this feature