Document Editor

Document Editor

The document editor has a lot more complex features that the Presentation editor. It is also quite stable but has also had more years to become so. The following document will present some of the features to notice and comments on the editor as such.

• Tables and diagrams are only shown as small “blocks”. This is an advantage it has over the presentation editor in that it is a lot quicker to use, since it needs not generate diagrams and tables.
• The review button on the editor makes a presentation template example without a related report. It should use the information in session rather than on database. No constant values, weights, expression filters will be sent with the Report (template) Request.
• Attachments can be inserted into the editor, so that people in the document viewer can click on these attachments and download them. Attachments will not be included in the PDF viewer.
• The document template has some quite advanced features to almost make a document into a small “web site”. For example the features “Page Link” (links you can click to move to another page), “Table of contents” (links to all paragraphs that are tagged as headlines), and “Insert Hyperlink” (that can link to all kinds of locations). I propose a tester is made test all of these thoroughly and then all that do not work perfectly should be removed. Keep the editor simple and use time on stabilizing those features that are key to the users.
• “Insert report” is a feature that Ulrik was extremely anxious on some years ago. I have not really heard anything on it for a long time, but it is a feature that I am still quite concerned about. The idea is that when viewing one report (main) then another report (secondary) can be loaded and inserted into the main report. This has a number of key issues, that I honestly no longer remember how and if we solved. Problems like: Access management, PDF conversion, handling of page links, handling of table of contents, etc. Have a talk with Ulrik and see if this feature is still important else I strongly suggest that we kill it since it could cause a lot of painful refactoring if ever to work perfectly.
• Finally, there are way to many icons on the icon menu tabs of the editor. Many of them should be moved to the drop down menu since they are seldom used. Another thing is that most icons do not disable when they cannot be used; e.g. if user is not located in the editing area some icons are still available. Potentially problematic and has earlier caused diagrams to suddenly be placed in the top of the dialog over the menu.
• An additional issue is the handling of diagrams related to templates (regards both Document and Presentation). Since the links to these can be removed in the editors but the diagrams still exist, it would be really nice if there was a diagram management dialog for both. This could also make a number of work processes much smarter and move some of the diagram inserting features into such a dialog instead. I have already added a request “VN2153REP - Improved handling of diagrams from document and presentation editors” and think it should be moved to a production version soon.