[Interface Kit] it should be possible to open disabled menus

[diver]

BeOS R5 has a useful feature which allows you top open disabled menus.

Currently it is not possible in Haiku.

After implementing this feature it would be possible to revert hrev38440.

[jessicah]

I'll give this one a try :)

[jscipione]

Patch 0001 looks good but could you put the item->Frame.Contains(where) condition first and also put curly braces around the if block because the condition spans multiple lines.

[jessicah]

Damn, I had the braces there the first time! I went through the style guide twice to try and see if I needed the braces or not. "omit braces for single line statements, place statement on a new line" needs to have an exception for the multi-line condition in the guide then... will amend :)

[jscipione]

Ok so, I did some research and there appears to be some debate about whether or not having a multi-line conditional makes an if statement multi line or not. Discussion is here: ​http://www.freelists.org/post/haiku-commits/r36596-haikutrunksrcappspackageinstaller,2

Since neither the coding guidelines nor the ensuing discussion reached any consensus I guess it is ambiguous. I also managed to find some code that omitted the braces with a multi-line. So disregard that part apparently the issue is not so cut and dry.

[jessicah]

Updated the patch anyway. Changed the dynamic_cast to be similar to other examples in the code, and also made it work for keyboard navigation for feature parity.

[jscipione]

Ok this looks good now. Will test and apply tomorrow.

[jscipione]

(In #4147) This fix for this bug was not right because it caused #6610

[jscipione]

Unfortunately this patch does not match the behavior of BeOS R5. It allows for a disabled menu bar to be opened but does not allow disabled submenus of menu bars to be opened as BeOS R5 did.

[jscipione]

Fixed in hrev45977

[jscipione]

The 0002 patch applied in hrev45979 reverting the non-style parts of hrev38440 that are no longer needed now that this bug is fixed. Thanks for all your help jessicah. Please chime in here and let me know if there is any changes that I overlooked or are not correct.

[diver]

Thanks! However, is there a reason in enabling menus with submenus on mouse over?

[jscipione]

diver, what do you mean by "enabling menus with submenus on mouse over"?

If by "enabling" you mean allowing you to navigate but not select submenus then the reason is two-fold:

1. BeOS R5 did it.
2. There is a usability principle which states that you should never hide functionality from the user, only disabled it. That way the user knows what is possible and what is not and is given feedback for what conditions must occurs for things become available or become unavailable.

If by "enabling" you mean that you can actually select the submenu menu item and make it have effect on the program then I have made a mistake.

[diver]

I mean that on mouse over menuitem's text color changes from gray to black which might lead to a false impression that this menu have effect on the program:

[jscipione]

Ahh, okay, you're right, that isn't correct, the text should be grey still to show that it is disabled.

[jscipione]

In hrev45981 I've updated the high color (the color of the text and arrow) of the disabled submenu items to appear disabled like the disabled leaf menu items. It was a little tricky because I had to tint the color differently based on the background color for each case and also had to make it work in case your selected background color was light instead of dark.

[diver]

It looks ok now, thanks! This ticket can be closed.