[OpenLayers-Dev] editing controls, preserve selection

[Steven M. Ottens]

Hi Pierre,

I'm currently more involved in user interaction design and not so  
much in coding so it could be that I'm cutting corners which are hard  
to cut but:

why do you need to switch between modifyFeature control and  
deleteVertex control?
IMO you can stay in modfiyFeature mode and allow the user to delete a  
vertex by selecting it and press the delete key or hit the right  
mouse button and select 'delete' .
I am aware that this approach forces the user to understand that a  
webpage has more controls than mere links: keyboard, scrollwheel and  
the right mouse button behave differently than in the classic Web.  
I've been a great advisory (?) of backwards compatibility but  
sometimes you need to take the extra step and force people to spend  
10s more time to get the new paradigm to save 9s every time they do  
the action.

This rambling has mainly focussed on your approach of feature editing  
and doesn't solve you core question of preservation of selection,  
sorry about that. I hope you solve your issue but even more I hope  
you reconsider your current design (TBH there are valid reasons to  
keep your current design, but ease of coding isn't one IMHO :)

good luck
steven

On Aug 22, 2007, at 2:44 PM, Pierre GIRAUD wrote:

> Hello all,
>
> Recently I worked on Tim's code to enhance the editing  
> functionnalities.
>
> The result can be seen in the camptocamp/feature sandbox.
>
> I'm now facing an little issue. What is frustrating for the user is
> that each time he switches between the two different editing controls
> (modifyFeature and deleteVertex), the current selection is lost. The
> user need to reselect a feature so that he can modify it.
>
> The problem is that when a control is deactivated, the select control
> it relies on is also deactivate and the selectFeature.unselect()
> method is called.
>
> Does someone has an idea of a workaround to let a control preserve
> selection so that another control can use it ?
>
> Regards
>
> Pierre
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