(long) Transparent IDE elements and other problems

[Frank Leahy]

On Friday, March 26, 2004, at 04:38  PM, 
use-revolution-request at lists.runrev.com wrote:

> From: Scott Rossi <scott at tactilemedia.com>
> Subject: Re: (long) Transparent IDE elements and other problems
> To: How to use Revolution <use-revolution at lists.runrev.com>
> Message-ID: <BC898538.B772%scott at tactilemedia.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"
>
> On 3/26/04 5:16 AM, "Frank Leahy" <frank at backtalk.com> wrote:
>
>> Sure.  I have a photo album app that can display up to 1000 photos in
>> an album (though there are other limits that prevent that many being
>> shown at once, but that's a problem for another post...).  Each photo
>> thumbnail is displayed inside a group that can have up to 3 
>> checkboxes,
>> 3 buttons and 10 editable fields for a total of 16 controls per photo.
>> Easily 16,000 controls or more on the page at once.  And I'd rather 
>> not
>> have the 1,000 limit which is arbitrary.
>
> I assume you have this many controls displayed because you can scroll 
> the
> page (card).  I think with a bit of work you might be able to build 
> this
> more efficiently by grouping the controls needed for a single photo 
> into a
> master group, and then populating the card with enough master groups 
> to be
> able scroll one ore two groups out of view. As one group is scrolled 
> out of
> view at the top or bottom of the screen, the off-screen group is then
> repositioned at the other end of the screen and populated with data 
> from the
> next thumbnail before it comes on-screen, and so on.
>

Scott,

I thought about doing that, but there are a bunch of good reasons why I 
didn't go that way.

Interestingly, I use the "master group" idea you refer to.  In my case 
I have 5 "templates" (or master groups), one for mini thumbnails, one 
for regular thumbnails, one for slides, one I call "slides plus" where 
you can do data entry, and one called "slides EXIF" which is "slides 
plus" plus edit and display of EXIF data.   The nice thing about this 
is that I can support a new template without changing any code at all 
-- if I want to support editing just title and description for example, 
I create the new template in my templates stack, and voila, it shows up 
in the popup menu, and works with drag and drop, etc. -- no extra 
coding required.

But back to the reason I don't use the hack you suggest -- it's 
possible to have dozens if not hundreds of images on the screen at the 
same time, and if I want to support drag and drop to reorder images, 
and drag and drop of images into the album (both of which I do support) 
I need to show all images otherwise those features don't work.

Anyway, the biggest problem I've come across so far is that a group can 
be at most 32000 pixels high, which effectively limits my "slides plus 
EXIF" template to 137 templates stacked vertically.  Really there's no 
reason RunRev shouldn't be able to support multi-thousands of images on 
screen simultaneously so that one need not resort to hokey hacks to 
display large amounts of data.

Best,
-- Frank