Summary

Implements the ability to select multiple journal entries in the journal entry view and perform group operations (like copy, delete) on them.

Owner

Name: Walter Bender, Gonzalo Odiard, Simon Schampijer, Martin Abente, Ajay Garg
Email: walter@sugarlabs.org, gonzalo@laptop.org, erikos@sugarlabs.org, tch@activitycentral.com, ajay@activitycentral.com

Current status

Targeted release: 0.98
Development status: This feature is tested to be working quite well in sugar-0.94 based dextrose-3 images. The patchset just needs to be ported over to the latest sugar code.

Benefit to Sugar

This feature allows the users to perform operations on multiple journal entries at once, making it very efficient if the user has to perform repetitive tasks like copying/deleting journal entries for many entries. The users can also filter journal entries by using the already existing search facilities and perform operations on those.

Two ways of selecting multiple journal entries have been provided. The user can either click the checkbox next to individual journal entries or use the select/deselect all buttons provided on the toolbar (which only shows up if the feature is being used). This UI takes some ideas from the standard gmail interface in how it allows users to select multiple entries and perform operations on them.

Another interesting and useful side-effect of this feature is that a user can insert a pen-drive with many activity bundles, select 'all' and copy them to journal. The resulting operation will install all bundles on the XO laptop!

Scope

This feature has already been implemented in sugar-0.94 based dextrose-3 builds. The feature just needs porting to the latest sugar version.

Patches

Patch in sugar-dx3 code repo: 1 2
Patch in sugar-toolkit-dx3 code repo: 1
Patch in sugar-artwork-dx3 code repo: 1 2

History

The implementation is almost identical to the one done by Martin; details available at : http://www.sugarlabs.org/~tch/journal2.mpeg

The only differences are ::

More copy-to options :: Clipboard, Documents (in addition to mounted drives).
When entries are copied to another location, both - the sources and the destinations - are de-selected automatically, without the user explicitly have to de-select them all manually.
There has been a progress bar added for batch-operations.

Basic utility of this feature

This feature, merely does a loop-over for multiple entries. That is, the workflow and the end-result in the following two scenarios should be exactly the same ::
- Entries, E1, E2, E3 .... En, are operated upon one after the another, individually.
- Entries, E1, E2, E3 .... En, are selected together, and operated upon one after the another, as a single macro batch-operaton.

Some particular use-cases ::
- Batch-operations ~~speeds up~~ makes XO-bundle installations more convenient, when multiple bundles are copied together from a USB drive to the journal. Thanks a ton to Sridhar Dhanapalan for the attention generated towards this (otherwise obscure) use-case.

UI Design

Typical copy-to workflow

[Step 01] Initial "Journal" view

[Step 02] Initial "Documents" view

[Step 03] Select an entry in the journal. The Edit-Toolbar, signifying batch-operations, appears.

[Step 04] Select more entries in the Journal.

[Step 05] Click "Copy" toolbar button, and select to copy to "Documents" from the pop-up

[Step 06] The confirmation alert appears. Click 'OK'

[Step 07] If there ia any error for a entry, the message is displayed as an alert. Click 'OK' to continue.

[Step 08] Progress status for entry

[Step 09] Progress status for next entry. Note that the progress-status changed without any user convention

[Step 10] Final "Journal" view. Note that all the "source" entries are de-selected.

[Step 11] Final "Documents" view. Note that all "destination" entries are de-selected.

Dependencies

None

Contingency Plan

Don't use this feature

Documentation

This feature was discussed in EDUJam 2011 and this feature page was a result of that.

Features/Multi selection screenshots

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