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List:       koffice
Subject:    Re: KSpread and kparts
From:       Simon Hausmann <shaus () helios ! med ! Uni-Magdeburg ! DE>
Date:       2000-03-05 12:38:32
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On Sat, 4 Mar 2000, Laurent montel wrote:

> Hello
> My name is laurent Montel and I work on kspread.
> I have a problem in kspread when I open a file in Konqueror.
> My problem is that kspread is creating before to load file.
> 
> In normal mode "kspread /root/toto.ksp", => loads file (in first)
> and after creates kspread.
> 
> But when I load in konqueror => creates kspread and after load file.
> 
> But I have a problem because to give table name in kspread we had to
> load file
> and after create kspread, otherwise table name is Table1 etc... and when
> 
> you when to change table it's not possible.
> 
> So is it possible to load file before create application ?
> 
> You can look at this problem :
> create a kspread file with 3 sheets and give 3 differents names,
> and load it in konqueror or "kspread file.ksp"

I currently don't have koffice compiled, so I can't test it right now, but
I think I remember this problem.

The solution however is not to rely on the view to be created *after* the
document has been loaded. I know that this is in fact a difference between
embedding in Konqueror and in KOffice, but actually all KOffice components
have to support loading a document if already views to this document
exist. 

A simple example: Imagine you have a really huge KPresenter presentation
document. It takes quite a while to load that document.
Now let's say the average user stores that document on his desktop and
clicks on the document icon in order to load KPresenter.

Currently the user will end up sitting in front of his computer waiting
10-20 seconds for the document to be loaded, without *any* visual feedback
though (the KPresenter window/view appears *after* the document has been
loaded) . In my opinion this is bad UI design (..the user will think that
KPresenter has crashed and will probably click on the icon a second time)

Actually we had this situation during our presentations of KDE 2.0 at the
CeBit fair: We clicked on a kpresenter document to show the
capabilities/features of KPresenter. Now we had to wait quite a long time
until the KPresenter window appeared, with the document loaded. I don't
know about the experiences of the others, but to me it occured quite a few
times that people asked: "Oh, did KPresenter crash?" .

In my opinion this is something that should be changed/fixed (KOffice
components being able to display an empty view/document while loading the
"real" document (some progress indication would be even better IMHO :-)

(and, as you mentioned/experienced, embedding in Konqueror works that
way: First we create the part/widget and then load the document)

From the programmer's point of view this should be easy to solve, I
think: Once the document is loaded, just do something like this:

YourDocument::documentLoaded()
{
  for ( all views )
   view->updateView();
}

YourView::updateView()
{
  -- update widgets, etc. to display the new document data --
}


I'm cc'ing this to the koffice list as this might be of general interest
:-)


Greetings,
 Simon

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