Element selection issues

[jmaher]

I wonder, does anyone else ever have this problem?

 

Sometimes I find it nearly impossible to select the correct textfield when it is surrounded by other elements (eg lines, or other textfields/statictext) and things are fairly small and close together.

 

Some reports which have many textfields 8 height, 6 pt font I find it very hard to select the correct element, even when you zoom in.

 

I submitted a bug about this:

artf2288

 

Anyone else have the same problem?

 

Jamie

[svenn]

No because I use the document structure view to edit items when I run into this issue.

 

To bring up the document structure do the following in iReport.

 

View -> Docking Panes -> Document Structure

 

You can then click on any item in the view and bring up its properties panel.

[jmaher]

I have used the document outline in the past, however it's a real pain to do.

 

This doesn't work very well when you have large number of elements (eg 50+ per band, with nested frames etc).

 

It means that you have to have properly named keys for each element and have them organized in the correct order.

 

As well, I found this frustrating when trying to move multiple elements via keyboard.

 

eg. You must select the range you want in the document outline, then you have to find an element out of that set already highlighted that you can select easily and then deselect/select it again in the main frame to transfer focus to that window in order to move them as a group.

 

Also, if you want to simply move just that one element it's quite hard to move it via keyboard arrow keys since the document outline will now have the selection focus.

 

If you have many elements and some of them have gotten mixed around via copying / pasting etc (names different from what you would expect) then it's hard to identify the element that you wish to select from the document structure.

 

 

The main issue here for me is that I can't just select the element by mouse click when it's y=80px by x=250px large because the coordinate system for selecting doesn't take into account zoom factors.

 

Hence if when zoomed in I click in the textbox at y=40 then it will select that element, but if i click in y=0-39 or y=41-80 px then it selects the adjacent element. It's like trying to hit the jackpot when clicking around randomly around the center to try and select that element.

 

(investigation here..)

 

Actually, I just noticed that it only seems to be the line elements surrounding other elements that screw up the selection code. The line's bounding box seems to extend much to far from the element for the size of the line, overriding the other element's box. I suppose it's to make selecting the line easier if it was a one pixel high line, but it seems to go a bit too far.

 

Jamie