Radio buttons are a very common UI control that are well understood by
users familair with UI's of the past decades, and also for programmers
reading the resulting state of the radio buttons. Allowing deselection
would be something users have not seen before, and I'm sure every UI
styleguide out there will advocate against allowing this even if it were
possible in the UI toolkit of choice. Allowing deselection is also
something programmers have not seen before (did the user really select
nothing, or is it still in its default state?) Therefore, having JavaFX
support such a feature would be supporting something that will probably
be avoided by everyone making UI's that are easy to understand by users.
I think we'd need to see more use cases, and also requests from other
users before considering such a feature. Even then it would go against
years of UI design and user familiarity with UI's on practically every
platform (it's amazing to be honest that almost all platforms use the
same concept for a group of choice of which only one can be selected).
If a radio button group really needs a way to express "none of the
above", then another option can be added that does exactly that.
--John
On 23/01/2023 19:04, Andy Goryachev wrote:
It is indeed the same in Swing: the initial state for a ButtonGroup is
all deselected. Kevin brought up a good example with HTML radio
buttons - in effect saying that this initial state indicates that the
user needs to make a choice, which is the most frequent case in an
HTML page.
However, it may or may not be the case in FX. Consider, for example,
a case where a file viewer presents a number of modes - (text | hex |
image) to present a file. These modes are mutually exclusive (thus
requiring RadioMenuItems or ToggleButtons), but one *must* be selected
initially, since it does not make sense to ask the user to make a
choice, instead a default choice must be made by the application.
Yes, it can be simply solved by making a default one selected in the
code, and that is what is usually done. I just thought that having a
property would eliminate extra code. One can also extend ToggleGroup
to provide that functionality, and that is what I have done in the past.
Thank you all for the discussion and insightful comments. Given the
negative feedback and availability of easy workaround I withdraw this RFC.
Cheers,
-andy
*From: *Nir Lisker <nlis...@gmail.com>
*Date: *Saturday, 2023/01/21 at 08:22
*To: *Kevin Rushforth <kevin.rushfo...@oracle.com>
*Cc: *Andy Goryachev <andy.goryac...@oracle.com>,
openjfx-dev@openjdk.org <openjfx-dev@openjdk.org>
*Subject: *[External] : Re: RFC: new property in ToggleGroup
I don't see it being especially useful. GUI's tend to work this way. I
remember it was the same in Swing.
On Sat, Jan 21, 2023 at 1:41 AM Kevin Rushforth
<kevin.rushfo...@oracle.com> wrote:
On 1/20/2023 2:57 PM, Andy Goryachev wrote:
I just want to add one thing - the initial state of
RadioMenuItems added to a menu is unselected, even if they
belong to a ToggleGroup.
One can say that having all unselected radio buttons in a
toggle group makes no sense, or perhaps it depends on the
application requirements - though I cannot find an example
where it might be needed.
Yes, it's initially unselected unless the app makes an explicit
selection. HTML radio buttons work the same way [1]. Some apps use
that to indicate that nothing was selected, but then once you
select it there will always be something selected.
So either we allow two different policies by adding a property
to the ToggleGroup, or we proclaim that adding a radio button
to a toggle group must have a side effect of one (first)
button to be automatically selected, otherwise the whole group
is in inconsistent state (or the app developer must write some
code to select one).
I wouldn't want to change the default behavior, since I can
imagine some apps relying on being able to tell if the user has
ever selected any of the choices.
Having two properties would be one solution, presuming we think
that we need to provide a way for the app to indicate that it
wants us to enforce the invariant of ensuring that the app can't
ever get the control in a state where nothing is selected.
Although, since it would be an opt-in, the app could just as
easily set the default itself as opposed to setting this new property.
-- Kevin
[1]
https://www.w3schools.com/tags/tryit.asp?filename=tryhtml5_input_type_radio
<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https:/www.w3schools.com/tags/tryit.asp?filename=tryhtml5_input_type_radio__;!!ACWV5N9M2RV99hQ!IHUhh-zd22k26dpWxaIMIQPWkUKslHglTRC3u7NgvYYyYi4ZLWiijdogZwo2f9iRPTRGkKW9kGAzk6Vz7Whx$>
-andy
*From: *openjfx-dev <openjfx-dev-r...@openjdk.org>
<mailto:openjfx-dev-r...@openjdk.org> on behalf of Kevin
Rushforth <kevin.rushfo...@oracle.com>
<mailto:kevin.rushfo...@oracle.com>
*Date: *Friday, 2023/01/20 at 12:27
*To: *openjfx-dev@openjdk.org <openjfx-dev@openjdk.org>
<mailto:openjfx-dev@openjdk.org>
*Subject: *Re: RFC: new property in ToggleGroup
How common a UI feature is being able to deselect the selected
item in a ToggleGroup via the UI such that no item is
selected? I don't normally see that in various apps or
toolkits that I am familiar with. What I do see is that either
a default item is selected or no item is selected initially
(which is the one and only time that there will be no item
selected), but in both case, once you make a selection, there
is no way via the UI to deselect the current item. Absent a
compelling need, I think the current behavior (once the fix
for JDK-8237505 is integrated) is sufficient.
What do other developers think?
-- Kevin
On 1/20/2023 11:31 AM, Andy Goryachev wrote:
Dear colleagues:
In the context of a recent PR
https://bugs.openjdk.org/browse/JDK-8237505
https://github.com/openjdk/jfx/pull/1002
<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https:/github.com/openjdk/jfx/pull/1002__;!!ACWV5N9M2RV99hQ!IHUhh-zd22k26dpWxaIMIQPWkUKslHglTRC3u7NgvYYyYi4ZLWiijdogZwo2f9iRPTRGkKW9kGAzkyU-UIVq$>
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57911107/javafx-togglegroup-not-functioning-properly-with-accelerators-radiomenuitem
<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https:/stackoverflow.com/questions/57911107/javafx-togglegroup-not-functioning-properly-with-accelerators-radiomenuitem__;!!ACWV5N9M2RV99hQ!IHUhh-zd22k26dpWxaIMIQPWkUKslHglTRC3u7NgvYYyYi4ZLWiijdogZwo2f9iRPTRGkKW9kGAzk5wy-flH$>
where a number of RadioMenuItems belonging to a toggle
group are added to the menu, we might want to add a new
property to the ToggleGroup which controls whether all
items in a group can be deselected.
If this property is set, a selected radio menu item can be
deselected via either keyboard accelerator or a mouse
click. If not, then not only this operation cannot be
performed, but also the first item added to said
ToggleGroup gets automatically selected.
This should allow for more flexibility in creating menus
with RadioMenuItems, but eliminate some boilerplate code
required in such cases.
The new logic would also affect any Toggle, such as
ToggleButton.
What do you think? Thank you.
-andy
