dennis.sigel@eng 2000-05-11

After using the Swing FileChooser class through a variety of
releases (on Solaris) here are a few observations, requests
and problems (some may be fixed on Windows at this point?)

1) Every? version has sorted directories and files
differently: case sensitive, case insensitive and various
mixes of files and directories.

2) Double clicking a file/directory should have only one
meaning. At present, it depends on how fast you click.
It can mean GOTO if its a directory, Open if it's a file,
or Edit the list entry. This is very bad...

3) There should be an attribute to force the filechooser
window to stay up after a valid selection of a file.
What ever happened to Push Pins?

4) On Solaris, the move up one directory button should stop
at the top level root directory, not wrap around to the user's
home directory.

5) The move up one directory should not be grayed out if
the filechooser is instantiated with ("."). See bug 4318667
The priority of this bug was reduced and not fixed for 1.3.
The workaround was to move to a lower directory, then move
back up as the button would activate. This is a problem
when the directory you start in has no sub-directories.
This forces a user to exit an application, then restart.
Since FileChoosers are an important part of applications, I
would think this is a real quality problem.

6) When the file chooser first comes up, or directories are
changed, a highlighted box appears on a random entry. This
occurs on Solaris, not on Windows.

7) It would be nice to have the option of splitting files
and directories into two separate scrolling lists.

8) The options FILES_ONLY, DIRECTORY_ONLY, FILES_AND_DIRECTORIES
are not clearly defined or well documented. Comments in the
Swing demos and comments in bug reports produce a number of
conflicting definitions.

9) This is a biggy! FileChoosers should be non-blocking or
at least this should be optional. Blocking all input causes
incredible grief for application developers.

10) layout is great, don't change it.