Morpho

Menu and toolbar are both useful and necessary! In particular, if someone want
to submit metadata, but not data, then the toolbar provides a way to use an
existing data file to create the metadata without setting it in the datapackage
wizard (which ends up submitting it). Secondly,without one of the buttons, one
cannot examine the import summary which shows a variety of problems that may
occur during import.

Reopened to continue this discussion, and cc'ing Chad, Chris and Mark to get
broader input.

You've said that the TextImport menus and toolbars contain needed functions.
OK. I would still argue that we should get rid of the menu and, for needed
functions, replace them with widgets that are traditionally found in wizards.
I'm striving for a clean, predictable user interface experience, and I have
never encountered menus and toolbars in a wizard before -- it would certainly be
unusual. I find it surprising when I hit that screen.

The functionality would be better served if it were integrated into the wizard.
For example, I think the initial screen asking whether to automatically or
manually generate metadata should have another radio button group asking whether
to include the data, and it would only be enabled when "automatic" was selected
above. The default would be to include the data. The two choices might be:

• Include data file in package (metadata and data in package)
• Exclude data file from package (metadata only in package)

Also, it should be impossible to move beyond the screen if no data file is
selected and "Automatic" is chosen, but it would be fine to move on without a
file if "Manual" is chosen. This is a clean, simple way of handling the
situation that is consistent with the wizard interface. Same thing goes for the
import summary. If it is essential functionality, then it should be another
wizard screen that has a scrolling textbox that shows up after the text import
has occurred, and it would give the user the ability to still go back if there
were unacceptable errors (like a wrong data type) and correct the problem before
completing the wizard.

In general, I think that wizard user interface elements should be "inline" in
terms of the series of screens that are presented. Menus and toolbars are more
traditionally window widgets, not dialog and wizard widgets.

Points about integrating functionality into the 'wizard' rather than using menu
and toolbars are good, although I have never seen any interface guidelines that
really discuss 'wizards' (and I always think of a wizard as just another
window.) However, I think menus and buttons are so common that having them in a
'wizard' is hardly confusing. I also wonder if we have time to change any of
this before out Dec 15 deadline.

The suggestion that "Also, it should be impossible to move beyond the screen if
no data file is selected and "Automatic" is chosen, but it would be fine to move
on without a file if "Manual" is chosen." makes it impossible to automatically
get metadata from a data file if one does not want to submit the data. I think
it should be just as easy to generate metadata for data the user doesn't want to
submit as for one he/she wants to submit.

Another piece of functionality that we should consider is the use of Excel files
as data. Currently with the toolbar, one can 'paste' tabular data copied from
Excel into the input data for use in creating metadata. To use this, one would
specify an Excel file as the data file, but then paste data from the file to
create the metadata.

Postpone until next release. There is some misunderstanding in your last
comment Dan about what I was proposing. We can clarify later...

menu and toolbar have been removed. DataPackage wizard now has a checkbox to
indicate that a datafile should be used to generated metadata but NOT submitted
as part of a data package.

Original Bugzilla ID was 369