EiffelStudio 24.05: New composer feedback
Thomas Goering
As Bertrand Meyer recently announced „a couple of mechanisms to facilitate common operations“ in EiffelStudio 24.05, I took a first quick look at the new composer features in the new now-downloadable EiffelStudio version. Here’s my feedback so far:
1. There are three new menu items under „Composer“ (in the Edit menu and the context menu of the editor):
Add Setter Ctrl+Shift+E, Ctrl+S
Remove Feature Ctrl+Shift+E, Ctrl+X
Add Creation Procedure Ctrl+Shift+E, Ctrl+C
The shortcuts are strange and at first I didn’t know how to use them. It looks like you have to press Ctrl+Shift+E and then (within a rather short timeframe) Ctrl+S,X,C. If you wait to long you either save the document or cut/copy the selected text. It is not visible that Ctrl+Shift+E enters some kind of „composer mode“ and when it is cancelled. Maybe this could be visualized somehow? In addition: How can these shortcuts be changed? They don’t appear in the shortcuts section of the preferences dialog.
2. Menu items „Add Setter“ and „Remove Feature“ are always enabled, but the corresponding items in the context menu are disabled/enabled based on the cursor position. E.g. while „Add Setter“ is disabled when the cursor is on a function or procedure in the context menu I can select it in the menu bar, the dialog appears and when I confirm it I get a „Operation Failed“ message.
3. Menu „Composer“ in the menu bar is in the „Edit“ menu under „Advanced“. In the context menu it is not but it appears above „Refactor“. Composer and refactor provide kind of similar functionality. So maybe merging these two groups would also help unifying the UI.
3a. I also noted that there is now a „Rename“ item in the context menu when the cursor is on a feature or a class name. But there is also „Refactor“ -> „Rename“ which seems to open the same dialog. What’s the difference between these two?
4. I noticed some wrong behavior in the "Add Creation Procedure" dialog in the table of attributes when there were two attributes in the class and I checked/unchecked "Use anchor type?". Then the type of just one attribute changed, the other remained unchanged. But I cannot reproduce this anymore...
5. This is from my answer to Betrand's original post:
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In general, my feedback to the new "Composer" functionality would be to streamline it with similar existing functionality (like menu Tools -> New Feature) and to avoid different parameterization (e.g. not possible to set the setter as the assigner command?) or to avoid duplicate functionality at all.
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Regarding setter methods the parametrization is different (add pre-/postconditions vs. assigner) and could be unified.
Thomas
Bertrand Meyer
Dear Thomas,
We are running out of shortcuts.
These are initial versions, they will be improved, so your observations are very useful. Thanks a lot.
-- BM
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Brother Bill
This should be available as some menu item.
Thomas Goering
Thomas Goering
Jocelyn Fiat
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