GSoC Project: Table Improvements

Hi All,

I'm a pre-final year student majoring in IT from NSIT, India. I am
interested to work for Abiword under GSoC. Last year, I worked for
LimeSurvey under GSoC, here's the link to my project
http://code.google.com/p/google-summer-of-code-2011-limesurvey/downloads/detail?name=Pooja_Narula.tar.gz.

I am particularly interested in the 'Table Improvements' project idea.
I have been looking into the code for some time now. It would be
really great if you could help me in understanding the code better.

Here's my understanding of current working of the code for table insertion:
When the user clicks the insert label in the table menu, the
insertTable method of ap_EditMethods class is triggered which
generates a dialog view, that invokes the user for details like
numRows, numColumns. On successful submission, ap_Dialog_InsertTable
class object stores these details. It then calls the cmdInsertTable
method that does the following:
- it determines the position at which the table is to be inserted
(pointBreak), in various scenarios.
- the table is inserted cell-wise, i.e., it iterates over each cell
and inserts it into the document using insertStrux function of
pd_Document. In terms of the layout, each cell can be seen as a
section, which contains a block, which then contains the contents of
the cell. Note that a cell can further contain a table inside it.
- it also creates a changeRecord for each cell; this is coalesced for
the table such that an undo operation removes the whole table and not
a cell.

Now, to enable the user to specify the header row, which will repeat
on the top of each page of the table, we can add a check-box in the
Insert Table dialog box. However before coming up with a solution for
the backend part, we should keep in mind the following scenarios:
- Editing the table like inserting/deleting rows/columns, changing
text, changing the font size, or anything that causes to alter its
position, should not alter the header row from occurring on the top.
- Editing the header row like changing text, font or cell size on any
page, should also perform the change in the header row of the other
pages as well.
Basically, whenever the table is edited, these header rows need to be rebuilt.

There can be broadly two approaches to go about this: one would be to
include the selected row as header on each page in the table structure
before rendering the layout and updating the table structure whenever
the table is edited.These changes would be similar to the way editing
of table is handled currently, say when we add a row, we can skip the
header rows from shifting their position. Though it seems to me that
this would be a bit inefficient.
Another way is to edit the final table layout to append the selected
row on each page, without actually editing the table structure while
creating and editing.

These are the initial thoughts I have which would surely groom once I
get an insight from your feedback.

Thanks very much.

Pooja Narula
Received on Sun Mar 25 08:23:26 2012