interface improvement: sort constraints

[Davide G. M. Salvetti]

Hi,

out of my experience, when you have a lot of constraints (say, teacher not available constraints, min days between activities, min hours daily, ...), it would be desirable to be allowed to sort them, just like one can sort teacher, subjects, and so on.  The filter really helps finding out things, but works unfortunately in one-at-a-time only mode.  Sorting constraints (say, by teacher surname, by student group, et coetera, whenever and wherever appliable) would IMO allow a more productive management of the constraints set.

On a similar ease of management vein, I would also add the possibility to specify min hour daily = 1, just to allow the user to raise and lower this parameter at will, even to 1, without needing to delete and add again the constraints (which, if done for many teachers, in the absence of sorting, let's the list quickly turn into a mess); of course fet should plainly ignore min hour daily = 1, treating it like interface sugar, because the allow empty days box should always be kept checked in this case.

What do you think?

[Liviu Lalescu]

I'll think of this.

For first part, sorting, this is complicated, but I'll think about it.

Second part: maybe an "active" flag for constraints. But I can only take care of this in all time/space constraints, because there is no space to add this in each constraint's dialog. Would that be OK? I mean add two buttons in all time/space constraints, "Activate" and "Deactivate".

[Liviu Lalescu]

I thought some more:

Each constraint has Boolean 'active' and string 'comments'. Sorting is based on comments (so the user can add comment like: "rank: 1", "rank: 2"). And 'active' and 'comments' can only be edited from all time/space constraints.

[Davide G. M. Salvetti]

I thought some more:

Each constraint has Boolean 'active' and string 'comments'. Sorting is based on comments (so the user can add comment like: "rank: 1", "rank: 2"). And 'active' and 'comments' can only be edited from all time/space constraints.

That would be very good:

• an active flag would let the user disable a constraint without deleting it and will, among its other uses, also avoid the need to have no-op like min hours daily = 1 just to keep the list complete;
• you reminded me that many times I really missed comments, even only to annotate to myself the reason I added a particular constraint: comments are indeed very good for themselves;
• sorting on comments could be a good compromise; of course having the possibility to sort on the fly on the base of different criteria without the need to alter comments would be better, but even only sorting on comments would be IMO a huge step forward toward ease of management for constraints.

[Liviu Lalescu]

I did this, see Snapshot section: http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/forum/index.php?topic=1040.msg6029

I added comments for activities and constraints, and activate/deactivate constraints, and sort constraints based on comments.

Please test and report results.