(After an extensive search, I'm almost sure there is no topic here suggesting this.. sorry if I'm wrong, though.)One thing that bothers me when dealing with dialogs is the fact that I can only use numbers to reference a dialog control. They're so poorly descriptive, so similar to each other and so limited. I actually use some distinct numbers, anyway (i.e. 1000 is reserved to OK buttons, 1001=Cancel etc.), but I still find this method so poorly descriptive (currently, IDs are also limited to a number I can't remember right now, 4000 or so). Don't you think?
I'm always having the need to go back to the dialog table to see which numbers I should use here and there, and the situation gets worse as the dialog gets filled with more and more controls.
One dirty thing that I do (sometimes) to ease this boring issue is to make identifiers (or vars) referencing all the IDs, but if you think of it, I'm doing the same thing twice (assigning IDs to dialog controls - firstly numbers, lastly names), which simply wastes my time and also slows things a bit (although speed isn't really the point here). Of course I'm more comfortable after doing this, because now I have names that won't be easily forgotten, so I'd rarely need to go back to remember IDs.
I could drop the identifier idea and simply write a txt or the like with an ID index, ok. This probably could be a better solution for many. However, I'd still do the same thing twice, no matter how I do it.
So I propose, why not support named dialog IDs?
This could also lead to wildcard matching support by the related commands and events (kinda like they support N1,N2,N3,...,NX ID lists), which is the other reason for supporting it, IMHO. I'd really, *really* like to use my combo list knowing it's called "
servers", not "
150". I'd like to disable some related controls using "/did -b $dname
servers.*", not "/did -b $dname
150,151,152,155,156". These are the simplest examples, anyway. Think of a huge, complex dialog. Wouldn't the dialog scripting process be faster then? Well, to me it'd be much faster with unique names than with unique numbers, for sure.
By the way, the suggestion is to *add* this support, so using numbers and lists of numbers should still work their current way.. otherwise people would kill Khaled for their broken dialogs. :tongue:
I currently don't see any disadvantage for the whole idea, but I may be wrong, so it's open for discussion (of course, that's why I'm here). The only issue I could think of would be that the dialog system is too limited to support this (since it already limits its ID numbers), but I couldn't be sure of any issue like this, which is also why I'm here.
Oh and please, don't flame the idea whether you don't agree with it, or find it ridiculous, or think I'm too lazy or anything else. Please don't question the way I manage dialogs. No need for such personal points when I'm not *demanding* anything, since I'm always open to consider it as a bad idea - as long as you come with fine, descriptive arguments about the idea
itself. This is a
suggestions board, nothing else.
