perl file browser

[Madison Kelly]

Taavi Burns wrote:
> On Wed, May 05, 2004 at 10:26:40PM -0400, Phillip Mills wrote:
> 
>>On Wednesday, May 5, 2004, at 03:37 PM, Ilya Palagin wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Of course, click 'Back' to go to parent, and loose all my selections 
>>>when I enter another subdir!
>>
>>Or use cookies (or some other session context) and save previous 
>>selections as if it were a shopping basket kind of application.  I'm 
>>sure there are a variety of ways to approach the problem, but I was 
>>focussing on Perl resources.
>>
> 
> 
> As long as the user keeps pressing forward (i.e. clicking links instead
> of hitting the "Back" button), keeping state between screens is trivial
> using the perl CGI modules.  It generally involves putting hidden values
> in the form, so that the next time a link within that form is clicked,
> those hidden values are sent along with the other visible form data
> (i.e. the new input).

Humm, I never thought about using cookies to track file selections, sure 
makes sense though. I am not too worried about a user using the "Back" 
and "Next" buttons because as you said, it will mess up the selections. 
I am sure it won't be hard for a user to get used to clicking on the [+] 
and [-] icon to the left of the file name or the filename itself to 
cycle the directory's display. I might also (have to) build it so that 
whenever -anything- is clicked while selecting files the changes are 
recorded. That might be cumbersome though if I need to use form for so 
many things. I don't know much about cookies because I haven't needed 
them up until now so I wonder how hard it would be to store changes 
there until the user selects some sort of "commit" option?

The tricky part I haven't thought about thoroughly yet is how I am going 
to make it as easy as possible for the user to select everything they 
want. I will find out soon though because the first stage of the program 
is almost finished and that will be the next challenge. I am hoping to 
figure out a way to use selection boxes similar to the way file lists 
are generated in other graphical backup tools I have used in the past.

Alas, -soooo- much work still to be done, so very little time to do it... :/

Madison

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