Difference between revisions of "Talk:History behavior"

Revision as of 11:56, 27 March 2007

--Ericb 17:23, 27 March 2007 (CEST): One thing that I don't like with the history mechanism in EiffelStudio and other tools is that it's not always the oldest item which is removed from the list. Let's consider that I looked at classes A, B , C, D in that order. The history will look like that:

A B C D
      ^

If I then go backwards to look at B again (using the history navigation means):

A B C D
  ^

and then decide to look at class E, then C and D will be removed from the history, even though I looked at them more recently than A:

A B E
    ^

I find this situation very annoying. In a tool that I wrote, I implemented a history mechanism where only the items to the left of the history (i.e. the oldest) are removed. It is probably not a standard behavior, but I find it more convenient. It works as follow. Let's consider that I have:

A B C D
  ^

and want to look at class E, then my history will look like that:

A C D B E
        ^

B has been moved forward because that's the class I was just looking at, and then E has been added. That way I don't lose C and D, they are still in the history, still accessible using the history navigation means. Likewise, if I then drop class C in my tool, the history will look like that:

A D B E C
        ^

I find it more convenient than:

A C D B E
  ^

because C is really the most recent class that I looked at.

--manus 22:56, 27 March 2007 (CEST) EiffelBench implemented something like that, but we dropped it partly because it was confusing. Moreover the fact it is not standard behavior might not be a positive point for certain people. However something we could do is preserving the back and forth button behavior (i.e. acting the same way as in your web browser) and changing the dropdown to list the most recently used items first and then the history (the way it is done in some of Microsoft tools for style/font selection). What do you think?