[squeak-dev] Table widget for ToolBuilder?

Casey Ransberger casey.obrien.r at gmail.com
Tue Jul 16 11:13:53 UTC 2013


So this is actually something I really feel is missing. 

TableMorph. We still don't have a spreadsheet, in spite of the fact that people of note have pointed out that one of the most powerful spreadsheets ever written (Analyst) was written in Smalltalk. 

I needed a table view awhile back (not a whole spreadsheet, just a simple table view) and went at it myself. Maybe I'm just not terribly good with Morphic, but this turned out to be rather more challenging/time-consuming than I expected. It was difficult to get the morphs to behave. Eventually I had something that worked for my purpose but wasn't general at all. 

As usual, I was distracted by something shiny and forgot about it. 

So a lot of people told me, when I asked about spreadsheets (this was farther back by around six months,) to look at Skeleton. At the time (when I didn't know Smalltalk) I wasn't able to file it in successfully and gave up, hoping I'd make sense of it later. 

Anyway the reason I'm bringing it up is: if Skeleton was ever able to provide anything like a spreadsheet view, the logic for a usable table layout must have been in there somewhere. I think it may have code that does it, but it would need to be decoupled from the spreadsheet logic.

Or you could just implement it from scratch. It just doesn't seem a terribly fun problem to slog through does it? Hopefully we'll have a simple general table layout that's easy to use in Morphic at some point.

Do let us know if you find/invent something that works, this is so common a thread that if we were usenet and not mailman, it would be in the FAQ by now. 

On Jul 16, 2013, at 3:01 AM, Frank Shearar <frank.shearar at gmail.com> wrote:

> I know! I just didn't want to have to write it! :)
> 
> frank
> 
> On 16 July 2013 10:41, H. Hirzel <hannes.hirzel at gmail.com> wrote:
>> To have a PluggableTableSpec  would be great!
>> 
>> --Hannes
>> 
>> On 7/15/13, Frank Shearar <frank.shearar at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Cool. So it sounds like there's something for Morphic, even if we
>>> don't have a PluggableTableSpec or similar, for ToolBuilder.
>>> 
>>> frank
>>> 
>>> On 15 July 2013 19:50, Chris Cunningham <cunningham.cb at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Not a default widget, but I've been using a table widget called
>>>> MutliColumnListMorph.  It is row oriented unlike most of the others -
>>>> which
>>>> should fit into the Archive veiwer nicely.
>>>> http://www.squeaksource.com/MutliColumnListMorph.html
>>>> It is pretty heavy-weight, though.  Lots of features that I like
>>>> supported
>>>> added as desired.
>>>> And definitely not part of standard Trunk today.  No reason not to be,
>>>> though.
>>>> And definitely not in the ToolBuilder today, either.
>>>> 
>>>> -Chris
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> On Wed, Jul 10, 2013 at 12:13 PM, Frank Shearar <frank.shearar at gmail.com>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>> I'm converting ArchiveViewer to use ToolBuilder to build its UI,
>>>>> rather than be a SystemWindow. ArchiveView simulates a table layout by
>>>>> using plain text and a monospaced font.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Does anyone have something like a PluggableTableSpec class lying
>>>>> around? Or suggestions on how to simulate a table with the existing
>>>>> widgets?
>>>>> 
>>>>> Doing this conversion removes a whole bunch of threads from the
>>>>> Tools->Morphic dependency.
>>>>> 
>>>>> frank
>>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>> 
> 


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