Design opinion request

Scripting Forums AppleScriptObjC and Xcode
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#1

I’ve got an NSPopUpButton that’s used to choose a destination folder for files that are selected in a table, to be moved upon clicking a “Process Files” button. During early development (my first dive into an app that actually does something), I’m just using the folder names in the popup, but I got to thinking that if this ends up with other users, there’s no telling what they might end up filling this up with.

The problem comes in with the possibility of more than one folder with the same name (at a different path) ending up in the popup. I’m wondering what some of you might think about the best way to handle this?

I see a couple/few possibilities.

¢ One would be to use full paths in the popup, but that seems tacky (and a really wide button could run off of the containing view).
¢ I could set a fixed size for the popup button and actually use the full paths, having them truncate either head or middle, but that could even end up clipping the actual name of a folder if it’s long enough (I’m trying to avoid a really wide popup).
¢ Another would be to try to activate NSPopUpButtonWillPopUpNotification and change the items to the paths for selecting while popped up (if that’s possible to do on the fly). Once an item is selected, the title would then be reduced back to just the folder name in the end. This might be acceptable.
¢ I’ve seen that you can set a toolTip for the button, but nothing about the items. If it’s possible to have tooltips show when hovered over each item that pops up, then that could maybe work (displaying full paths), but I’m not holding my breath on that one. Right now I’m doing thing the hard way (as anyone experienced would probably see it) and just clearing the items and adding each item one by one, so at the moment I’m not binding to any real menus or array controllers or any of that. That comes later in my learning cycle. But if toolTips are available when loading the popup a different way, I guess I could go ahead and adjust. Probably not good HIG etiquette, anyway.

I’d like to avoid alternatives, like “ask list” dialogs or another table, if possible. I do want to allow same names from different paths, however, as this would be valid usage for this app.

Any ideas, thoughts, comments on what you would do if you were up against the same task?.. Thanks.

Dave.

#2

Try what apps like BBEdit do: show full paths only when there’s more than one folder of the same name.

#3

You could do it like XCode RecentProject menu item does - show only the folder/item name, but when 2 exist, only include the first parent folder of the object. That assumes also that the parent would be different. If you had “user.name/Library/ApplicationSupport/someFolder” then you might have to drop back several levels until you reach a unique starting place. :confused:
Could be a little complex however you do it.

#4

For temporary, I just dropped a label (text field) and set the type to grey and small size to show the path of what’s been selected, leaving the popup as single names. But I stumbled on another app that used an NSPathControl and thought maybe that would be good to use here. In that other app it doubled as opening a folder in Finder if a cell was clicked on, which I guess I could include as another shortcut in my app.

[Edit/Add:] Yeah. I just messed around with it in IB and I like how it acts if I load it up with a long path. Resizing it shows me what would probably happen with even longer paths. This should do.