Presagis

The attributes window. Very useful, on the whole.

But one aspect of it is becoming increasingly annoying for me and the rest of my team.

When clicking on a node in the hierarchy, the aspect of the screen that becomes selected by default isn’t the node, or the geometry within it… it’s the bloomin’ first text box in the attributes window.

As a modeller, my primary objective is to model, so when i select a node in the hierarchy or geometry in the viewing window, i want that to be what I’ve selected. If I’d have wanted to change attributes in the attributes window, I would have clicked somewhere in the attributes window. But I didn’t. I realise clicking a second time reverts back to having the node selected, but that’s not the most sensible way of doing things, is it? You’re clicking the node because you want to select the node, surely?

This is especially annoying when copying and pasting various nodes, either within a single openflight, or across openflights (which is what we spend a fair amount of time doing). But when you think you’ve highlighted a set of switch nodes and pressed ctrl+C, what you’ve actually copied is ‘0’ from the ‘Current Mask Index’ box of the switch node attribute box.

I don’t want the ‘Current Mask’ Index ‘0’ to be selected, or ‘0.000000’ of the ‘significant size’ LOD switching box, or, worst of all… ‘Flipbook Animation’ ‘Type’, because if you select a group node, then press ctrl+F to go into face mode, what you’ve actually done is just animated something you really don’t want to animate, as the press of the F key pushes it into forward flipbook animation mode.

Yes, we could keep the attributes window closed, but what causes it to appear is sometimes rather random, and it soon jumps back onto the screen again. A click, a double click, blinking? Plus we use it a lot, and so tend to keep it open.

But please, is there either a way to turn off the fact that a click on a node will default to the first text box of the attributes window? If not, can it be patched out? I know 5 out of 5 modellers in my team agree. We’ve all experienced this gripe, and I’m sure some of you guys and girls must have too.

Right, rant over. Hope everyone is having a happy and productive Tuesday!

Ya know, its something that has bothered me in the past, although not so much as to cause me to rant in public 8*)  And the effect is compunded by the fact that it only does this on a new node type, if you select an object and then another object, no switchie the input focus, but a group and then an object, the transparency becomes selected.

And then sometimes when I think I AM typing in the object’s name field, I am not.  And when I type ‘airfield’, it splits the polys, isolates, goes to trackplane face mode, gives me an error or two, turns off lighting, and goes into wirfram draw mode before I can stop my hands!

So - it would be nice to be consistant, and just not auto-select a field of any sort in the att box with out explicitly selecting it.

Thanks for detailing out your woes.  Personally I don’t think customers gripe enough!  These little annoyances make a huge difference when your using the tools day after day. The team will have to discuss this issue and see if anything can be done to ease your pain.

Note that you can disable this behavior if you simply uncheck “Reflect Selection” on the Attribute Page.

When this is checked you are telling Creator you want the attribute page to be loaded with any newly selected node.

Ahh lovely, that solves the problem of the attributes window seemingly appearing at random.

Still doesn’t fix the fact that the auto focus defaults to the first text box in the attribute window whenever a new node type is selected, rather than the node itself or the geometry within.

Although as Chris says, hopefully the team at Presagis can come up with a fix or an option to turn it off.

I’m another “silent griper” for all of the reasons above, and I don’t know how many times I’ve hit Ctrl-V thinking I’ll see some new stuff appear on the screen, but instead I see a bunch of my vertices all collapse into one X location.

I just tried the “Reflect Selection” checkbox… I always wondered what it was for but never investigated it.  It doesn’t seem to be very helpful for this issue, and I’m not sure when it would ever be useful for me since it seems like you need to constantly turn it off and on.

TCS - 09 March 2010 09:02 AM

I just tried the “Reflect Selection” checkbox… I always wondered what it was for but never investigated it.  It doesn’t seem to be very helpful for this issue, and I’m not sure when it would ever be useful for me since it seems like you need to constantly turn it off and on.

Yes, on second inspection it doesn’t seem very helpful as you do need to turn it constantly on or off. And once it’s off, it doesn’t seem to stay off.

Here is the Help Topic for the Reflect Selection checkbox on the Attribute Page (to save you a trip to the Creator Help File)

Reflect Selection

Although you can open as many Attributes windows as you like, you may prefer to keep only a single window open. To do this, set the Reflect Selection checkbox in the upper-right corner of any Attributes window. Now each time you select a node in the Hierarchy view, the Attributes window changes to show the attributes of the selected node. This is convenient when you want to minimize the amount of screen space used by Attributes windows or navigate through the database hierarchy using the DB Navigator Panel (see “DB Navigator Panel” ).

If you clear the Reflect Selection checkbox, a separate Attributes window appears each time you double-click a node. This is useful if you want to compare the attributes of different nodes.

Ok, we’ve done some investigation here and have found the following:

The Keyboard Focus is set to the Attribute Page in the following situations:

1) If you “explicitly” launch the Attribute Page for a node - you do this by either:
1.a) Double clicking on a node
1.b) Invoking Attributes>Modify Attributes with a node selected
2) If you “implicitly update” an open Attribute Page - you do this by selecting another node while ANY Attribute Page is open with Reflect Selection = ON.  Note that the problem is worse when you select a node whose type is different than that of the node in the open Attribute Page (e.g., select an Object node when the Face Attribute Page is open).

It seems the complaint is (rightfully) with 2).  If that is the case, we can change Creator to NOT set keyboard focus when you “implicitly update” an open Attribute Page.  We agree with the consensus here on this thread that setting the focus in this situation is very rarely what you want.  And if it was, it would be up to you to explicitly set focus to the Attribute Page.

However, what about 1)? It seems to me that if you “actively” launch the Attribute Page, you might want the keyboard focus to be set to the first control in the Attribute Page so you can start typing or “tabbing” to set some values.  This behavior would be consistent with all other dialogs that “pop” up because you asked them to pop up.  Furthermore, if focus was not set, you would have to click somewhere in the newly opened Attribute Page to explicitly set the focus before you could begin typing or tabbing around there.

That all said, I would propose that we fix Creator to NOT change focus when you “implicitly update” an Attribute Page but leave it alone (have Creator set keyboard focus to the first control in the Attribute Page) when you “explicitly” launch the Attribute Page.

Anyway, let us know what you think…  We’ll consider your comments here before doing anything.  And thanks in advance!

Personally, I’d like the keyboard focus to be set to the name of the node.

So the question is:

When the Attribute Page is “explicitly” launched (as defined above), what is the desired behavior wrt Keyboard Focus?

a) Don’t set any control on the Attribute Page to have focus
b) Set the ID field to have focus
c) Set the first control (non ID field) to have focus

I agree that the auto focus should be set somewhere in the attributes window if you double click a node. Whenever I double click a node, it’s because I want to change its attributes. So I agree with the fact that this should remain the same.

But then once I’ve done that, and leave the attributes window open (usually because I know I’ll want to use it sometime in the future, but maybe not right away), and then start clicking on other nodes because I then want to start modelling again, it’s the nodes and the geometry that really should be selected, not an auto focus back in the attributes box again.

So yes, my gripe is with point 2 (rightly, as you point out ) and it would be lovely if it is changed.

So unless there are any other comments, here’s what we’ll do:

1) If you “explicitly” launch the Attribute Page, Creator will set initial keyboard focus to the ID field.
2) If you “implicitly update” the Attribute Page, we’ll keep focus on the database window so subsequent keyboard shortcuts won’t get “swallowed” up by the control on the Attribute Page.

We’ll keep monitoring this post for further comments ...

And thanks (as Chris noted in his original reply) for bringing this up.  We don’t always hear about your gripes but are very interested in solving problems when we can!

Arrrgh, just got bitten by this one again! 

If an object node is selected, and you hit Shift-F to switch to “Face Mode” - you also just turned your object into an animation. 

The long zig-zagging concrete wall looks kinda cool as it flashes on one polygon at a time in sequence… but it’s not quite what I intended.  (It actually happened twice on this, while testing the database on 2 different occasions weeks apart, and I know I fixed it in between.)

If an object node is selected, and you hit Shift-F to switch to “Face Mode” - you also just turned your object into an animation.

Huh?  I don’t understand what you did.  Can you explain this a bit more?  Thanks.

Sorry, I was typing in a hurry and said Object when I meant Group…

In either of these situations:
* Attributes Window is not open, and you double-click a GROUP node to select it and open the Attributes Window…
or
* Attributes Window is already open and you have anything other than a Group node selected… then you type Shift-G to be able to select a Group Node, then immediately click on the Group in the Graphics Window…

... the Attributes Window will display the attributes of the selected Group.

If you then immediately want to select a single face, you type Shift-F to be able to select the polygon. 

Since the Attributes Window was still open with the Group’s attributes displayed, Shift-F is interpreted by Creator as “set the Flipbook Animation Type to Forward”... because that attribute has focus.

It’s easy to miss this when it happens, because unlike when you type a shortcut to change Selection Mode and inadvertently collapse your vertices or edges because the X Coordinates field has the focus, it’s not something you can see happening in the Graphics Window.  It sets the Animation Type to Forward which is invisible until you actually view the scene running in a realtime system.  An unfortunate coincidence that Shift-F is the only keyboard shortcut that corresponds to the 3 options of Forward, Backward, or None while the default focus active.