GSoC 18' Update 3: Explorer Dialogs Everywhere
Continuing from the work done last week, I’m glad to say that the Drag & Resize features are complete after a few rounds of mentor feedback and discussion.
Multiple Explorer Dialogs
I implemented the feature by creating a new dialog each time the explore button is clicked at a 10px offset from the previously opened dialog. The offset was added to provide the user with some visual feedback every time he/she opens a new dialog.
During this week, there was some discussion about the behaviour of this feature. Did we really need to avoid opening of duplicate dialogs? Initially, I implemented it in a way that prevents duplication but then we imagined that users may wish to see different states of the same entity so opening duplicate dialogs for the same entity shouldn’t be prevented.
I also fixed some bugs related to resizability and draggability. Different views on the explorer dialog were affected by the addition of the resizability feature such as the tree view and table view. In the case of the Dialog being resized to a very small size, the toolbar was too big for a small sized dialog. Besides these, I fixed another bug by preventing opening new Explorer Dialogs outside the viewport.
So now the first micro-task T187874 is complete and WQDS finally has Multiple Explorer Dialogs that are resizable and draggable. Feel free to check out the Explorer at query.wikidata.org!
What’s next?
I will begin working on the Graph Explorer from next week!
In the existing state of the Graph Explorer, a user can see and expand outgoing links but not incoming links. Adding this feature will make exploration of the query results more intuitive and informative for users.
Thanks for reading :)