[bt-devel] General Book Navigation

[Gary Holmlund]

On 12/01/2010 08:59 PM, Greg Hellings wrote:
> I have a question about our current implementation of the General Book
> navigator widgets.  Currently I see two of them - the collection of
> drop-down boxes across the top of the module corresponding to the
> different levels of the text, and the toggleable tree view.  Currently
> we only display the selected node of text in a module, which could be
> admittedly tiny or gargantuan.  However, there is always the
> possibility that a module is arranged such that some of these nodes
> are blank - usually because they are entirely structural and all of
> their content is in a collection of descendant nodes (as an in-print
> comparison, the New Testament node in many Bibles might be said to be
> empty when directly selected, because all of its content lies within
> its 27 child nodes.  Likewise the Matthew node is empty and even the
> Matthew 1 node is empty.  This is because all the content is stored
> within the leaf nodes.  Perhaps this is an extreme example, but it is
> one worth considering).
>
> Since we are a desktop application, and we have moved to an HTML
> widget capable of some pretty heavy lifting, why do we limit our
> display this much?  Am I being unrealistic when I think that it is
> feasible to load a full General Book into the display widget and then
> allow the navigation to jump to particular locations within that
> display rather than just replacing that display with the next single
> entry that was selected?
>
> I'd be willing to tackle this, if we think the performance is feasible
> and the functionality desirable.  It would be a good place for me to
> finally bash my head against the BibleTime C++ code base after just
> wandering around this mailing list and IRC channels for so long.
>
> --Greg
Greg,

I suspect that there are some large books that might be to big for 
performance and memory size reasons. A possible alternative would be to 
display a chapter at a time (Chapters = First level nodes). Perhaps the 
display granularity could be a display option chosen by the user. I 
would encourage you to experiment along these lines.

Gary