Name: rmT116609 Date: 03/15/2004


A DESCRIPTION OF THE REQUEST :
Our package names are often twice as long as the space available in the top left frame, AND it is the right hand end of these names that is the most important part to view, when selecting a package to display.

One solution would be to Right justifying these entries either always, or via the CSS file.

I have tried to modify the style sheet to achieve this, but was unsuccessful. Maybe a lot more of the formatting needs to be exposed in the style sheet.

A second option might be to display only the last (right hand end) package name (I guess thats the unqualified package name) and use a tooltip to display the whole name (thanks Doug for that suggestion). However this raises the issue of how they are sorted, by unqualified name or fully qualified name?

A third option might be to remove any prefix which is common to more than (say) 5 packages and put the prefix on a line by itself with the suffixes (only) listed below and indented by 2 (say) characters.

This way at least an organizations reversed domain name prefix is removed from the packages, and in some cases longer common prefixes are also removed. Where the prefix does not represent an actual package, it would not be a link.

Here is an example from the JDK1.4 docs formatted this way. (taken from a portion that "overflows" the frame width)


javax.security.auth
  .callback
  .kerberos
  .login
  .spi
  .x500
  .cert
javax.sound.
  .midi.spi
  .sampled
  .sampled.spi
javax.sql
javax.swing
  .border
  .colorchooser


This problem is made even worse when there is a mix of short names and long names, if you scroll right to see the end of the long names, the short ones may not display anything on the screen because they have scrolled off the left.

I am hoping someone can come up with an intuitive solution to this problem, otherwise as a minimum let us control the justification in the style sheet.

JUSTIFICATION :
Difficult to find the desired package name when parts of the name are scrolled off screen. Our current longest package name is just over 50 characters, and the frame only shows about 29 characters.
(Incident Review ID: 238017)
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