Hi,

I would like to add details configuration to plasma-nm again, this was present in KDE 4, but it's not present in Plasma 5 anymore. It needs to be rewritten in QML and I need a help with how it should look like and what feature it should have. I would like to also extend it and make possible to even change details visible below the connection name (bug report for this feature. I have two possible ideas how it could look like and work.

1) The first one comes from the KDE 4 version of this configuration. Basically at the top it has a horizontal view with details which should be visible below the connection name and then two vertical views with hidden details (those visible when you expand a connection) and available details which are not visible neither below the connection name or in expanded details, but you can add them there.


2) The second one is just one view, with list of all details where each entry has two state buttons. One button would make a detail visible below the connection name and the second one in expanded details. The mockup is missing buttons on the right side to set details priority.


Other ideas:
- Each detail could have an icon representing whether a detail is available for all connection types or it's connection specific (eg. [wifi_icon] SSID)
- Possibility to set details for various states, I can think of specifying details for activated connections and deactivated (eg. you don't want to see wireless security below the connection name when the connection is activated and you want to see the traffic instead)

What do you think? Thanks for your help and ideas .

It's great that you're implementing that level of configurability!

As for the interaction, I'd envision a direct manipulation approach like in the new window decoration config UI in Plasma 5.2: Put a box of information items on one side and representation of both the list of connections and the connection detail view on the other. Add an instruction that users can add information to the views by dragging it to a view. Removing information would be done by dragging it out of the view. Rearranging by dragging works as well, of course.
That way, users can see the results of their actions immediately, making it much more comfortable to configure the views.

That's probably more difficult to implement than your suggestion, but hopefully you will be able to reuse stuff from the windeco UI (which was done in QML as well).

Great idea with using Drag and Drop . What about using GridView which should have DnD implemented and we don't need to place there three separated views.

jgrulich wrote:Great idea with using Drag and Drop . What about using GridView which should have DnD implemented and we don't need to place there three separated views.

We don't care about the implementation If it can be made to look approximately the way I described (the closer it looks and behaves to the actual UIs the better). WOuld it also be possible in a gridview to rearrange items via drag & drop within each "view"?

I have been thinking a lot about this and I want to object to make this configurable. There are so few details to show and they are rarely needed. I would strongly suggest to simply make a good design for presenting all options in an area that is usually hidden and will only be shown on click.

As far as I understand, the configured details would only be visible on such a hidden / only show on click page anyway. So configuration would only allow users to hide some details and sort the remaining on this not-directly-shown page. We can do a proper sorting ourselves (in fact we have done that before, see http://user-prompt.com/kde-network-mana ... ls-sorted/) and seeing the little amount of details available, it makes little sense to exclude some of the details.

So summing it up: a configuration for the details is just too much. Spend your precious developer time on something more valuable

You are right and given that I don't have much free time for plasma-nm improvements as before I'm not going to implement anything from this anytime soon. Thanks for your help .

I guess one thing we could / should improve though is connecting to hidden networks. This is a nightmare, as users currently do not get any support or better automagic pre-configuration of the network. As a user I should - as with visible networks - do nothing more than enter the name of the hidden network and the password. But I need to do much more and the first hard step is to actually find where I can configure the hidden network at all. Do you think you have time to add something helpful there?

bjoernbalazs wrote:I guess one thing we could / should improve though is connecting to hidden networks. This is a nightmare, as users currently do not get any support or better automagic pre-configuration of the network. As a user I should - as with visible networks - do nothing more than enter the name of the hidden network and the password. But I need to do much more and the first hard step is to actually find where I can configure the hidden network at all. Do you think you have time to add something helpful there?

Sure, I just don't have any idea how to do that. In the old applet there was an empty field at the bottom of the applet (or at the top, not sure right now). We can do the same, but I don't think it would be possible to simply add an empty field directly to the list of connections without adding some "fake" connection to my model, which is something I would like to avoid. Another option would be to add a button next to the one which opens the editor, like the new bluetooth applet does and open a dialog once you click on that button.

I would suggest to add an icon next to the reload wifi networks icon to initiate connecting to an invisible network. Also we could add a separate section into the connection editor to access it...

Another thing I noticed: There are no tool tips on the Checkboxes and Buttons in the applet. I guess add these could help to improve overall handling.

What do you think?

bjoernbalazs wrote:I would suggest to add an icon next to the reload wifi networks icon to initiate connecting to an invisible network. Also we could add a separate section into the connection editor to access it...

Another thing I noticed: There are no tool tips on the Checkboxes and Buttons in the applet. I guess add these could help to improve overall handling.

What do you think?

Adding an icon there is fine with me, but adding a separate section in the editor would be redundant, because the only difference between adding a regular wireless network and hidden wireless network would be a default value of the hidden network checkbox.

There should be tool tips in Plasma 5.3.0, but only for buttons, not for checkboxes.

jgrulich wrote:Adding an icon there is fine with me, but adding a separate section in the editor would be redundant, because the only difference between adding a regular wireless network and hidden wireless network would be a default value of the hidden network checkbox.

What I thought off is a wizard, that helps the user to connect to the network. So in a first step it asks for the name of the network, tries to find it and then - in a second step - asks for any information it cannot automatically detect (Hopefully only the password). This would be quite different to the current approach in the connection editor.

jgrulich wrote:There should be tool tips in Plasma 5.3.0, but only for buttons, not for checkboxes.

I will check once 5.3 arrives on my computer (Arch packages seem not to be available yet)