Back in the old pga2 days, we used to use a control developed by the quietest member of the devteam (Mark) for all the multiline edit boxes. It had a handy feature in that it had it's own maximise button which would maximise it to fill it's parent frame. This was actually quite elegant and worked rather well. Before pgAdmin 3 was started, we had toyed with the idea of making the textbox detachable (this is roughly the point at which Andreas' head will probably explode :-) )
Fortunately, hard hats not only prevent from damage caused by outer impacts :-)
into a mini-editor.
Now, if we added such a control to pga3, we could immediately make all the dialogues back into 'real' dialogues. All we would need to do is figure out how the detachable editor should behave (modally speaking for example) with respect to it's parent dialogue and the rest of the app for it to be able to work in a fashion that's acceptable and liked by all.
When mentioning modal you're scratching the problem. Making the additional window modal would probably have more impact on other parts. In this case, it would be a frame (eventually covering the whole screen), being child of a dialog. This is probably not gonna work smoothly (pgadmin-wide modal). Modal dialogs mean "the developer didn't now how to handle the stuff better, so he locks the rest of the machine", reducing to single task programming.
All apps that offered such kind of editing facility I can remember drove me nuts (VB 'zoom', SyBase AppModeler too). I do see the necessity to have much space available for editing, but I'd expect that in practice extended functions/views aren't edited using the property dialogs, but with the query tool instead to have the code saveable into a file any time, including the test code used for developing it. Using the property dialogs is a bit like fixing your app by applying patched bytes at runtime instead of modifying your sources and recompiling.
Redesigning dlgFunction/dlgView to be nonsizeable and have the Zoom button would probable make these dialog look nicer, but make them quite unusable too (unless Zoom is pressed; did I mention I hate the M$ epidemic use of windows layering one atop another?).
Regards, Andreas
---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 8: explain analyze is your friend
