NewsRog Tutorial 3: Common Features

Tutorial 3: Common Features

Contents:	Online Help	List Features	Drag&Drop	Searching
Contents:	Sorting	Column Selection	Clipboard	Summary

Online Help

Most program gadgets (buttons, text gadgets, lists, sliders, etc.) have online help available. This may be turned on or off in the MUI preferences for this program. The help is displayed when the mouse pointer is left stationary over a gadget for a few moments.

List Features

Many times in NewsRog it is necessary to deal with lists of items. For example, there are lists of news servers, lists of news groups, lists of articles, lists of various types of news filters, and so on. There are several features that are common in most of these lists.

The above is a section of one of NewsRog's list windows (specifically, the list of subscribed newsgroups). Notice the 4 icon buttons next to the title that says, "Subscribed Groups (2)". These buttons appear many places in the program, and their function is always the same.

From left to right:

	The first button is used to search for particular items in the list.
	The second button is used to sort the list by various criteria.
	The third button is used to change the data displayed in various columns of the list.
	The fourth button is used to copy text from the list into the system clipboard.

These features will be described in more detail shortly. For this tutorial, select the Project/New menu item to clear any current project, and then press the button labelled Groups to open the groups window.

In this and all the following tutorials, the example windows in the documentation may not exactly match those you see. Your local display is affected by your MUI preferences for fonts, colors, spacing, etc, and by the native language you have selected in your workbench preferences. These examples are designed to be viewed on a screen resolution of 800x600 or better.

For more general information on using lists, consult the MUI user documentation.

Drag & Drop

In lists that support reordering (such as Select Filter or Display Filter lists, the contents of the list can be reordered by drag selecting one or more items in the list, dragging the selected items horizontally out the side of the list, and dropping them back into the list in a different position.

Items may also be copied between lists of similar types (for example, between two lists of Select Filters by dragging one or more items from one list and dropping them on another.

Searching

To see how searching works, it is necessary to have some items to search through. For now, we will not worry about whether the groups we create exist on your news server. Press the button labeled Add Group, and type a name such as my.test.group into the string gadget next to the button. Repeat this process (chosing a different name) until you have 3 or 4 groups with different names.

Now press the search button. A window that looks like this should appear:

You can type into the string gadget, and the list will jump to and highlight the first item that contains the letters that you type. Try it now.

This search box contains many features:

Normally, pressing return in the pattern gadget or pressing the Search button will search for the next occurance after the present location. Pressing the From Top button will begin the search again from the top of the list.
The Select All button will select (highlight) all of the items in the list. Many operations in NewsRog operate on the selected items, so that you can perform operations on more than one group (article/server/etc) at once.
Unselect All is the opposite of Select All.
Toggle All toggles the selected state of all the items. Unselected items become selected and vice versa. This is useful to perform operations on all items not matching what you typed.
Selecting the Case checkbox will cause searching to be case sensitive. Otherwise, it is case insensitive.
Selecting the SubString checkbox will allow the search to match characters in the middle of a name. For example, typing if SubString is selected, then typing "foo" would match "news.foo.group". Otherwise, the entire name must be typed (or matched via wildcards).
If the First checkbox is selected, searching will stop after the first match that is found. Otherwise, all matching entries are highlighted. This may be slow if used together with dynamic searching.
Selecting the Dynamic checkbox will update the search results after each keystroke that you type. This can often allow you to find what you are searching for after just a few keystrokes. On slower machines, it might be useful to turn this off. When off, search results are only updated after pressing the return key or using the Search button.

Note that not only fixed strings, but entire AmigaOS patterns can be typed in. For example, you might search for "Frank*Smith" in a list of articles to match "Frank Smith", "Frank S. Smith", or "Frank Samuel Smith". Consult your Amiga documentation for more information on AmigaOS patterns, which are very powerful.

Sorting

Article and Group lists can be sorted by various criteria. Pressing the sort button will show a popup window like this one:

The exact choices will depend on what you are viewing. For example, the sort entry for news articles has different choices. You can select any sort criteria, and the display will be instantly updated to reflect your choice. For example, you might wish to keep newsgroups sorted by the last date you read that group, and article lists sorted by posted date. The Reverse Sort button can be used to sort from largest to smallest instead of smallest to largest.

Press the button again to close the popup window once you are satisified with the sort order.

Column Ordering and Selection

Many times, there is more data available than you wish to see at any given time, or you wish to change the order in which the columns are presented. This is possible using the List Column button, which brings up a popup window that looks like this:

You can grab one or more entries from either the shown or hidden columns, and drop them on the other to control which attributes are displayed. To drag items out of any multiselect list in NewsRog, select the items and drag them sideways out of the list.

Also, you can reorder the displayed columns by dragsorting. For example, you can select the last two columns in the Displayed list, drag them sidewise out of the list, and drop them back into the Displayed list in a different position.

Either press the Close button or press the button again to close the popup window.

Copying Text to the Clipboard

The text displayed in a list can be copied to the clipboard. Pressing this button will present a popup window that looks like this:

If the Use Titles checkbox is selected, then column titles will be copied to the clipboard; otherwise, no titles will be clipped.

The Separator text will be put in between the data copied from each column of the list.

Pressing the Clip button will copy the selected entries to the clipboard. They can then be pasted into another Amiga application such as a text editor.

Pressing the Close button, the Clip button, or the button again will close the popup window.

Here is an example of the results of clipping some items from the group list window, using space as the separator string.

Group Name        Last   Read  New  Group  Unread
c.s.a.misc        Today 02:02    0    500      10
c.s.a.networking  Today 04:07    0    151     125
c.s.a.programmer  Today 04:09    0    472     180
r.b.marketplace   Today 04:30    0     13      12

Summary

By this point in the tutorial you should understand:

How to obtain online help.
How to drag sort items in a list.
How to search for items in list.
Various features of the search window.
How to control list sorting.
How to chose which columns are displayed or hidden, and in what order they are shown.
How to copy text from a list to the AmigaOS clipboard.