Kevin Menard commented on CAY-1077:
-----------------------------------
The new dialog is a definite improvement. A couple of comments on usability, however. It looks like these are comments about the prefetch chooser as well, which is understandable as they're designed to be similar.
1) The difference between toOne and toMany is blurred to the point of being potentially confusing. At least two columns of values are used all the time, which can be confusing for toOnes, which should only use a single column.
2) The toMany is selected automatically, which is nice, but can also cause the user to generate syntactically correct, but logically wrong maps. This may not be a huge issue, but the case I'm thinking of us is someone inadvertently messing up a relationship that the modeler created via the sync button.
3) I can't envision a case where cyclical mappings would be what the user intended. Perhaps if each path had a qualifier attached to it, but that's not possible currently. So, I would suggest removing components already in the path from being candidates. I think this would go a long way to addressing the usability issue raised in #1.
> ObjRelationship Mapping Dialog Improvements
> -------------------------------------------
>
> Key: CAY-1077
> URL: https://issues.apache.org/cayenne/browse/CAY-1077
> Project: Cayenne
> Issue Type: Improvement
> Components: CayenneModeler GUI
> Affects Versions: 3.0
> Reporter: Andrus Adamchik
> Assignee: Kevin Menard
> Fix For: 3.0
>
> Attachments: patch-CAY-1077.txt
>
>
> [This is a GSoC 2008 task]
> The biggest complaint about the ObjRelationship mapping dialog is that it is often unclear how it operates, especially to the new users. I.e. empty list of DbRelationships is displayed as a white area, not giving any hints on what needs to be done to map a relationship. So that's confusing. Same thing when you add 1 path component, there is no hint that you can chain more path components for the flattened relationship.
> At the minimum we may just add some hint text ("Select next DbRelationship" in grey over the next available dropdown), but ideally we should implement a path browser, similar to how the SelectQuery prefetch and ordering browsers operate (and similar to how OS X Finder does).
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