Notes2 NotePropertyData

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Summary

The Note Property Data refers to all the data of a note which does not belong to the Note user data. It may contain:

• Status of the Note Window (e.g. shown/hidden, rolled in/out, position)
• Rating of the User (e.g. priority, task completion, filtered/unfiltered)
• History (author who created the note, author of the last change, date of creation, date of last change)
• Relationship to other Notes (e.g. reply status)

Rationale

User do not only want to access the information by others, the additionally want to see when and by whom this Note User Data has been entered. Or users may search and filter for notes - then additional data is required to provide the data basis for such functionality.

Assumptions

tbd

Proposed Designs

Proposal "Author and Date/Time of Creation"

This proposal considers the format how to display the name of the Note's author and the corresponding creation date/time. Due to the limited width of the Notes Window, there also limited space for displaying the name of the author.

Source of Data

The source of the data is the page "User Data" page in the menu "Tools -- Options... -- OpenOffice.org":

• First Name
• Last Name
• Initials

The kind of data acquisition causes the following constraints:

• The user has the choice of filling out any of the fields. In the worst case, no information is available at all.
• The capacity of each of the fields above is not really restricted (from the user's point of view), therefore it is possible to enter strings with any length.
• The given information may not refer to the real author of the note. (UseCase: User A works on his/her own text, but uses the operating system account of User B. The Notes of User A will be handled as if they were written by User B.)

Format of Name

The following table contains the proposals on how the complete name of the author should be composed, dependent on the available information (refer to "Source of Data"). For the examples in the table, the following source data is assumed:

• Full Name: John Q. Public
• Resulting First Name: John Q.
• Resulting Last Name: Public
• Resulting Initials: JP

Availability of source field data			Format of name
First Name	Last Name	Initials	Notes Functionality	Change Tracking (Reference)
yes	yes	not relevant	First name and last name are combined with a blank. John Q. Public	First name and last name are combined with a blank. John Q. Public
yes	no	not relevant	First name is used. John Q.	First name is used. John Q.
no	yes	not relevant	First name is used. Public	First name is used. Public
no	no	yes	The initials are used. JP	The placeholder "unknown" is used. unknown
no	no	no	The placeholder "Unknown Author" is used. Unknown Author	The placeholder "unknown" is used. unknown
Please note: The documented behavior of the Change Tracking feature has been checked in OOo 2.4 Writer. In general, the behavior of Writer and Note is slightly different in terms of visualization or Change Tracking information.

Ellipsis of Name

If the complete name of the author is larger than the indicator is able to display (e.g. due to limited Note Window width), then:

• the complete name is ellipsed accordingly, including consideration of following three dots ('...').
• a tooltip should provide the complete name at that position (e.g. only at the Note Property Data: Author Name). If there is no need for the ellipsis of the complete name, then the tooltip is not provided.

Example: The long name "Johnboy Bigfoot-Smallname" (25 characters) is displayed in the Note Window which exemplary only is able to display 22 characters:

Johnboy Bigfoot-Sma...

Format of Date/Time

The formatting for date and time should respect the settings for the whole OpenOffice.org user interface.

Please note: It seems that the Change Tracking feature uses the language settings of the current document. Those meta-information should be given in the language the user selected to be used in the user interface OpenOffice.org.

Proposal "User-Friendly Time/Date Information"

The proposal extends the proposal "Author and Date/Time of Creation".

Instead of using normal time and date information, the displayed information could be adapted to the "model" of the user. This is similar how some advanced email programs handle the date and time information for received mail. The following examples are intended to show you the idea and therefore do not represent a specification:

• Use "Yesterday, 10:21 am" instead of "2007-12-10, 10:21 am".
• Use "Friday, 9:32 pm" instead of "2007-12-14, 9:32 pm".
• Use "1 hour ago" instead of "2008-01-15, 4:45 pm".

Selected Design

tbd

Implementation

tbd

Code Changes

tbd

Outstanding Issues

If possible, the behavior both Notes functionality and Change Tracking should be harmonized in Writer (with the newly specified Notes behavior as reference). In the best of all worlds, the other OpenOffice.org modules would be taken into account, too.