Re: Fields arranged as a sentence

[Dick Margulis <margulis -at- fiam -dot- net>]

I think the programmer has gone out of the way to provide a 
user-friendly, helpful interface that you should embrace 
enthusiastically. The only suggestion I would make is that where the 
field is limited to an enumerable set of choices (as with the 
operators), the choices should be presented as a dropdown list.

In our own application, we do something similar, refreshing each 
dropdown list, if necessary, on the basis of the choices made up to that 
point in the sentence.

If you find this challenging to document, just slow down a little and 
bite of smaller chunks. Devote as much space as necessary to describing 
the use of each field before moving on to the next. Provide callouts to 
key the discussion to the fields, etc. Don't try to reduce the 
documentation to a table of field names and definitions, as this clearly 
will not do the job. If you are working under severe style manual 
constraints that you feel prevent you from addressing the particular GUI 
in a satisfactory manner, discuss these artificial constraints with your 
boss/editor/whoever and address them; don't let them stop you from doing 
your job.

My two cents,

Dick

LDurway -at- pav -dot- com wrote: