[Design Patterns] pattern for marking changed items before save

[Eli Cochran]

Sean, the pattern that you suggest is a particularly difficult one in  
web applications since state is difficult to carry from page to page,  
and if the user forgets to save then data is lost since there isn't a  
local copy. I'm not saying that's impossible just that both the  
technical and user model are tricky. For example, Sakai handles the  
back-end for this pretty well, but I suspect that most users are  
clueless as to what tasks they've completed and what tasks they've  
left in an unfinished but partly saved state.

- Eli

On Dec 11, 2007, at 10:29 AM, Sean Keesler wrote:

> If the task at hand is to “edit things that are related to each  
> other or think about your changes before committing them”, then I  
> would argue that you might want to be able to “edit things” across  
> multiple pages of the document and think about them before committing.
>
> However, it looks like this design requires the user to  “save”  
> changes on the current page before  they can edit anything on any  
> other page.
> I like the general idea though.
>
> Sean
>
>
>
>
> On 12/11/07 1:08 PM, "Barbara Glover" <barbara.glover at utoronto.ca>  
> wrote:
>
>> Hi Eli
>> Thanks for sharing this.  It's quite interesting.  I like the idea  
>> as well for times when you may want to think about something  
>> before it's actually committed.
>>
>> The little red triangle is an interesting cue marker as well.  And  
>> this allows the person as they work on the data to keep track of  
>> cells they've changed.  This approach might be especially good for  
>> large data sets like shown here.
>>
>> One thing I found difficult was determining how to save.  It took  
>> me some time to notice the Save icon in the upper left corner.  I  
>> had been looking in the lower right.
>>
>> I think this could be another inline edit "pattern".
>>
>> Barbara
>>
>> On 10-Dec-07, at 12:15 PM, Eli Cochran wrote:
>>
>>> I stumbled an interesting twist on inline editing. Most of the  
>>> time that I encounter inline editing the pattern is to save the  
>>> data immediately after it's edited. But this example marks each  
>>> edited item and then the user has to explicitly save the data.  
>>> The design has a lot of problems but I like the idea of it, and I  
>>> like the way that they mark the changed bits.
>>>
>>> Double-click a cell to edit (like I said, there are issues).
>>>
>>> http://creamarketing.net/jqgridview/demos/demo5/
>>>
>>> For complex data where you might want to edit things that are  
>>> related to each other or think about your changes before  
>>> committing them this is a great pattern.
>>>
>>> It brings up an interesting question though. Can you mix a save  
>>> on edit pattern (which is great for lightweight data) with this  
>>> edit and then explicitly save pattern and have it make sense?
>>>
>>> - Eli
>>>
>>>
>>> . . . . . . . . . . .  .  .   .    .      .         .              . 
>>>                      .
>>>
>>> Eli Cochran
>>> user interaction developer
>>> ETS, UC Berkeley
>>>
>>>
>>>
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>>
>>
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. . . . . . . . . . .  .  .   .    .      .         .              .     
                  .

Eli Cochran
user interaction developer
ETS, UC Berkeley


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