Extraneous layout reset

[emyoulation]

In a Discourse support thread, Jean-Claude's workflow is disturbed by a behavior of the Combined view mode that has been inherited by the CardView.

Each time object focus changes, the layout resets back to the default. In his case, changing Active Person focus resets the layout from being set to the Events tab to the default Relationships tab. His objective is to use the Graph View to navigate through a family and take advantage of the Combined view mode's Event tab to identify Events with insufficient citation proof.

Dave pointed out how your CardView makes the unsourced Events event more accessible than the Combined view mode does.

Since the 1st column (with the Parents and Siblings panel + the Siblings subpanel) distracted from the Timeline Events & Citations, I collapsed those panels. But every time I switched active Person, they re-expanded.

Is there a way to avoid layout resets when switching focus objects? (But, darn it!, sometimes users will f*-up the layout and WANT the reset.)

p.s.
I also tried copying the default Template & turning off everyone but 'self' in the Timeline in the new template. Then collapsed all but the Timeline column in the Person CardView mode to make it more 'selfish' than all the Relationships. (It took 45 minutes before I found all the Configuration options needed to make the a 'selfish' Person CardView.)

Perhaps a Selfish variant of the Person CardView (without the Parents & Siblings column or their events in the timeline) makes sense in the People Category? The Relationship's CardView could be the current, more cosmopolitan, subset of Configuration.

[cdhorn]

There are two separate items here.

The first is that I don't save and restore user layout state between refreshes. I will give that some thought.

The second is navigation related. Both Person and Relationship are anchored to the Person object as the navigation type. So if a user links to a person which of the two should be given focus? I might perhaps provide an option to favor one over the other with a toggle on the context config menu. I will give this some thought as well.

[cdhorn]

Not sure I mentioned but added second item, so you can toggle between people linking to people or relationships category.

Sort of related to your first item... before you could of course open the config editor to change to another template to switch between your selfish view and the default one. Well I junked the "debug" window that wasn't really useful anymore and ctrl-left click now brings up a templates context menu with all available templates so you can quickly switch to to any one you want.

[emyoulation]

Junked? I hope it will still be there but just less accessible form the GUI. Otherwise, I shall have to keep a "restore point" of the CardView so that this feature can been explored in the future.

One of my long-term ambitions is to create a Gramplet (although a QuickView is probably more appropriate) that renders the selected object & its secondary objects in Gramps XML. (Thus creating a way to move object snippets between Trees -- leveraging the Clipboard & Import Text Gramplet.) And the Debug's rendering of an object as code seems like a good reference point. My not ready for that technical challenge yet -- but I can be patient.

My net access has been brutally throttled for the last 2 weeks andy activities have been reduced to offline & forum support only. Hopefully, access will be restored tomorrow & I can start being a useful contributor again.

However, now that your project has attracted some more testers, my testing & feedback services are no longer terribly important. I'll drop back a bit so that more perspectives can be voiced.

[cdhorn]

All it did was output the serialized json of the four possible objects tracked for context which was useful when I was debugging an issue at the time. You can always run a json export and examine that, or write a simple Gramplet that displays it for the active object on the page.

Your active participation in helping test and many of your suggestions have been of great help, thank you! It has been good to get some feedback from other users now too which I'm grateful for.