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Cascading Configuration

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 Posted Tuesday, October 16, 2007
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In 3.6, a way of inheriting settings from parent groups and global options was implemented.
While this did ease the management of many connections, i feel it is inflexible as there is no way to "override" a specific option for a connection without turning off inheritance for the whole thing -defeating the point.

I propose a method of cascading settings:

The top level is Global. This are base settings.

When you make a group, it inherits all the settings from Global but you can change any option overriding just that global setting - all others still apply.

A sub-group inherits from the Global group, plus its parent group.

A connection inherits from Global and all parent groups, and its own options can be changed.

This would do away with the "Use settings from" listbox as it would no longer be necessary - all settings would be automatically inherited but any option can be overridden.

The difficult part is how to visually display this in the dialog.
Where there are textboxes, the inherited value could be displayed in a lighter colour (but not disabled), you could then type into the box the overriding value which would be in black.
The same could be done for radio buttons and checkboxes - the inherited value in grey, black if it is set at this level.
Post #1688
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 Posted Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Supreme Being

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The difficult part is how to visually display this in the dialog.
Where there are textboxes, the inherited value could be displayed in a lighter colour (but not disabled), you could then type into the box the overriding value which would be in black.
The same could be done for radio buttons and checkboxes - the inherited value in grey, black if it is set at this level.

Thanks you for the feedback. You mentioned perfectly valid and very important point - how to represent such inheritance so users could have the clear idea what settings that are editing. I guess the most practical way would be to show properties table like in Visual Studio 05/08 designer, but this concept is not very user friendly, especially for not so advanced users.



Kindest Regards,
SmartCode Solutions Support

Post #1689
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