Text toggle expanded state styles

Nothing is perfect! This is where you can post your ideas and wishes for functions you'd like to see in Help & Manual. Current version only please (H&M7).

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Mark Wilsdorf
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Joined: Thu Dec 24, 2009 8:41 pm
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Text toggle expanded state styles

Unread post by Mark Wilsdorf »

Sorry, the Subject of this post doesn't explain well.

What I'd like to have is text toggles for which the Help: Expanded property could have different states depending on something like Table style class naming (phone, desk_tablet, etc.). Here are the primary cases:

* If a "style" is not associated with the text toggle, the Help: Expanded state is determined by the checkmark box, as it works now.

* If a "style" is associated with the text toggle, the Help: Expanded state is determined by the style. So for example if the desk_tablet style is associated with the toggle, the toggle's default expanded state will be True (expanded) if running on a desktop PC or a tablet but False (collapsed) when running on a phone.

Also--and this is less important than the suggestion above--it would be helpful if the expanded state of every toggle on a page could be preserved during the current session (in Webhelp, especially). As things are now, if the user follows a link to a different page, then clicks on a Back button to return to the original page, all the toggles display in their default expanded/collapsed state. If the user had, say, one of five normally-collapsed text toggles expanded when they left the page, it would be helpful if that same toggle was expanded when they returned--and especially helpful when nested toggles are used.
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Tim Green
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Re: Text toggle expanded state styles

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Mark,

These are all understandable requests but they are also very complex and error-prone to implement. The problem with things like this is that there will be a huge number of different wishes and needs associated with them. It would be possible to build something like this if you were doing it for just one person; then you can cater to their specific needs. Doing it in a generic system for "everyone" just doesn't scale, however. Then it would get so complex that it would be unusable and errors requiring constant extensive trouble-shooting would be the rule rather than the exception.

Kitchen gadgets could be a good analogy here: It's possible to have clever gadgets for all kinds of things in the kitchen. Taken on its own each one of them does actually make the task it is designed for easier. But as soon as you have more than a couple of them you find that the complexity and trouble in the kitchen is increasing rather than decreasing. You're spending much more time cleaning, maintaining, taking out and putting away your gadgets than they could ever save for you. :?
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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Mark Wilsdorf
Posts: 151
Joined: Thu Dec 24, 2009 8:41 pm
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Re: Text toggle expanded state styles

Unread post by Mark Wilsdorf »

Thanks Tim,

I assumed as much; just wanted to throw the suggestion into the pot in case others have the same need.

And who knows, maybe someday due to now-unforseen opportunities this concept might bubble to the top of the stack as doable and/or important.
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