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Bug 131184 - Context menu unusable at small resolutions
Summary: Context menu unusable at small resolutions
Status: NEW
Alias: None
Product: platform
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Window System (show other bugs)
Version: 6.x
Hardware: All All
: P3 blocker (vote)
Assignee: issues@platform
URL:
Keywords:
: 131077 (view as bug list)
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2008-03-26 15:20 UTC by emi
Modified: 2010-08-11 13:31 UTC (History)
3 users (show)

See Also:
Issue Type: ENHANCEMENT
Exception Reporter:


Attachments
screen shot of poroject context menu (98.26 KB, image/png)
2008-03-28 15:20 UTC, Lukas Hasik
Details

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Description emi 2008-03-26 15:20:57 UTC
The project properties context menu is unusable if it has too many items. At a resolution of 800x600 on a normal
NetBeans install on Ubuntu, the lower parts of the popup are invisible (eg. the Properties menuitem).

OS: Ubutu 8.04 x86
Java 1.6 Sun, NetBeans 6.0.1
Comment 1 David Simonek 2008-03-26 15:39:10 UTC
Passing to projects...

IMHO this is caused by long lasted lack of support for long menus in Swing. Ideally, menu that doesn't fit the screen
should scroll to enable user use all its items.

Perhaps projects team can workaround it by separating into submenus - but I think we officially support only 1024X726
resolution and bigger, so you are out of luck :-(
Comment 2 Milan Kubec 2008-03-26 21:14:05 UTC
I'm sorry, but minimal resolution needed for NetBeans IDE is 1024x768, see:
http://www.netbeans.org/community/releases/60/relnotes.html#system_requirements
Comment 3 emi 2008-03-27 09:16:59 UTC
I'm sorry but I don't think that a huge context menu will scroll at 1024x768 just as it doesn't scroll at 800x600. I'd
say the bug stands.
Comment 4 Lukas Hasik 2008-03-28 15:20:04 UTC
Created attachment 59288 [details]
screen shot of poroject context menu
Comment 5 Lukas Hasik 2008-03-28 15:22:13 UTC
I was not able to reproduce with j2se project. The j2se project contextual menu fits to 800x600 screen. But when there
are more menu items - e.g mobility project menu - then it doesn't work.

Product Version: NetBeans IDE Dev (Build 20080326082655)
Java: 1.6.0_04; Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM 10.0-b19
System: Linux version 2.6.24-12-generic running on i386; UTF-8; en_US (nb)
Comment 6 Milan Kubec 2008-03-28 15:44:59 UTC
Lukasi, but minimal required resolution is 1024x768, there is no point to try to fit into 800x600, the IDE is unusable
anyway. Please could you test also 1024x768. Thanks.
Comment 7 emi 2008-03-28 15:54:58 UTC
I don't think it's relevant the resolution, maybe I should have rephrased my bug report.

The Platform is modular and thus people will install different modules which might introduce new menuitems in the
project context menu (or any other popup menu).

The way it looked to me working on 800x600, the popup menu doesn't have any "scroll" feature so the bottom part gets lost.

The same bug will show up at 1024x768 or at any resolution given enough installed plugins that register their own action
for that project / context menu.

So to me this is an OpenIDE bug not necessarily Project UI. I just noticed it in Project UI.
Comment 8 Milan Kubec 2008-03-28 16:05:37 UTC
OK, now I understand. Dafe, then it should be really fixed somewhere in platform/winsys? Probably Standa would know?
Comment 9 Stanislav Aubrecht 2008-03-28 17:12:20 UTC
i'd say that if the popup menu is too large to fit some desired resolution then it's rather a poor ui design of the
platform application than a platform bug:)
there's no swing support for scrollable popup menu's afaik. emi, how about refactoring some menu items into sub-menus?
Comment 10 Milan Kubec 2008-03-31 08:11:24 UTC
Changing to Enhancement since it's not in fact a defect. Support for such menus is missing even in Swing. Reassigning to
core/winsys, because the solution is more general than project/ui.
Comment 11 Petr Chytil 2008-05-07 09:28:43 UTC
*** Issue 131077 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***
Comment 12 dburrowes 2008-05-07 17:40:43 UTC
I'm the person that added the related/duplicate issue 131077.
I agree with emi that this issue is independent of the exact resolution.  I was working on a screen much larger than 
600xpixels tall, and ran into the problem that crucial menu items were inaccessible.

In a way, I agree that this is a result of unfortunate UI design.  yet, with the extensible nature of the system, 
things like this will happen sometimes.

I'll give a concrete example problem:
- I've got a pre-existing project that uses an ant script. It had maybe 50 or 60 targets in it.
- The main build target requires a parameter (-Dfoo=bar)
- I can't specify that argument in the build command in the projects dialog, but was told to use the special 'run 
target' command in the ant script contextual menu
- of course, the ant script contextual menu shows all the targets, which goes right off the bottom of the screen, so I 
can't get at the "run target" command in the menu.

If you work through this example, there are a couple places where UI redesigns could eliminiate the problem, but in 
the end, this kind of situation still seems like it will occasionally appear.