Unusual use of Outlining

Hi David,

Those sound like an excellent set of features!

Remember that span indicators can provide custom highlighting for a range of text. You should probably use those for custom highlighting of your outlined areas.

We do have an internal event that fires when a node is expanded/collapsed but it's not exposed publicly. I'll add that to the TODO list.

Maybe in the meantime, override the OnMouseDown method. Store the number of display lines before and after you call base.OnMouseDown. If they changed, you know a node change occurred.

Hmmm... okay, thanks for exposing the events.

However, I'm not sure what a span indicator has to do with this exactly. I'm refering to the text that you see (by specifying it) when you collapse a region with the outlining feature. The text is not syntax highlighted. In otherwords it mimics what VS.NET does, but I'd argue that what VS.NET does isn't all that wonderful. In my case, I lose a big feature of my search result output window if I can't both collapse without outline (for context lines) and have syntax highlighting when collapsed.

-- David

Actually... even Visual Studio allows some syntax highlighting within collapsed text. This is a feature I requested a while back.

http://www.actiprosoftware.com/Support/Forums/ViewForumTopic.aspx?ForumTopicID=770#2545

[Modified at 10/03/2005 01:41 PM]

David, can you give a before/after collapse example of what you want to display highlighted and how it should appear? If you are collapsing text I don't follow exactly what you want to show up representing the collapsed text. Also remember that the tooltips when you hover over a collapsed node are syntax highlighted representing the contents of the collapsed node.

When collapsed, I'd want a single line of text that is syntax highlighted just like the line would be if it wasn't collapsed. The other lines in the outline group won't be visible when collapsed, but will when expanded (as it does now).

In my particular use, I'm doing a global find for a string... for example: "foo" and telling it I want 2 context lines before and after each hit. So each result returns between 1 and 5 lines (the line with the "foo" hit, plus possibly one or two lines before and after). The reason it is not eactly five lines per is because the hit might be near the very top or very bottom of the file where there are no more contextual lines, right? :)

So, each hit is an outline group which starts collapsed. You see the hit line, just like you do in VS.NET except it'll be syntax highlighted and have an indicator underlining the hit string in the line. If you click the outline plus, it'll expand to show you the context lines around it, so typically that'd be 5 lines with the hit line in the middle.

I can do all of this except for maintaining syntax highlighting when it's collapsed because you just give it a string to display, which it shows plain in a tinted box (VS.NET style). What I'd like is an alternate form where you specify what line of the document to show. It collapsed to showing just the line you specified (specified by line index, whatever). It doesn't put it in a box, or try and do anything fancy. Just display the line in the same way it always does; syntax highlighting, indicators, and all.

-- David

An alternative to David's proposal would be to provide an offset range to use as the display text instead of an entire line. Then you could just display the text from that offset range with the highlighting that would have normally been used for the text in that offset range. If offsets create problems (since they could split tokens and create difficulties for the syntax highlighting to use), perhaps a Start Token and End Token instead.

Yeah, that'd be even more powerful.

I added this to the TODO list. We'll have to discuss it in detail in the future design of 4.0 since I don't think it's a straightforward thing and there might be multiple ways of handling it.

Rats. :(