It is no longer possible to expand groups in the "Edit Symbol Fields" window

[Ben Gamari]

In my build of Kicad `master` from a few months ago (mid March 2018, I believe) it is possible to expand groups in eeschema's "Edit Symbol Fields" window. In my build of `master` today this is no longer possible.

I found this functionality quite useful during part selection. With the new behavior it is very inconvenient to find out which part disagrees with others in its group.

[Jeff Young (jeyjey)]

Unfortunately the wxWidgets tree control that supported this was responsible for most of the bugs in this feature (and there were a lot).

You can sort the columns by clicking in their column headers, which might help some.

[Ben Gamari (bgamari)]

Indeed this is a shame as it severely limits the usefulness of the edit symbol fields feature.

My typical workflow when designing a board is to first draw a schematic, often pulling from existing schematics from prototypes and related projects, and then perform part selection using this feature. Since my schematics come from different sources, I often have multiple similar components with different parts. Previously it was easy to look at the components involved and resolve the inconsistency by choosing one of their parts. However, the removal of the tree control made this process significantly more labor-intensive.

Since I suspect this is a very common workflow, I suggest that we keep this ticket open. I understand that there may be no solution immediately available, but the removal of the tree view has eliminated one of the major use-cases for the "edit symbol fields" feature.

[Seth Hillbrand (sethh)]

@Jeff-

I missed that you were removing the tree view. Which bug report was it that couldn't be fixed without removing it?

[Jeff Young (jeyjey)]

@Seth, there were a litany of bug reports, but the ones that weren't possible to fix without either modifying wxWidgets or getting rid of the wxDataViewTreeCtrl were:

Flaky selection on Mac (*very* hard to activate a cell, leading many Mac folks to assume they weren't editable)
https://bugs.launchpad.net/kicad/+bug/1759756

Edited contents sometimes get put into row below that being edited on Windows
https://bugs.launchpad.net/kicad/+bug/1737361
https://bugs.launchpad.net/kicad/+bug/1763223

Editing collapsed tree entry sometimes hangs (probably Windows-specific, but hard to reproduce).
https://bugs.launchpad.net/kicad/+bug/1761378

[Seth Hillbrand (sethh)]

@Jeff-

Thanks for the links. I use this dialog often while designing but without the ability to expand the grouped elements, I can't see which elements have different entries in a group. I don't know of another way to synchronize a large design without resorting to a text editor, so I'd like to fix this.

I'm happy to work on it if you've got other things to handle. My immediate idea would be to utilize the wxPropertyGrid.

Thoughts?

-S

[Jeff Young (jeyjey)]

@Seth, the only warning flag I'd see is that wxFormBuilder uses it heavily. I don't have any data that shows that wxFormBuilder's bugginess is a /result/ of wxPropertyGrid, so it'd be more of a vague uneasiness than a "don't go there".

Only way to know for sure is to try it out. I don't have any objections as long as you don't put in anything remotely related to that damn wxDataView gizmo.

Oh, and I'd have to advise not to touch the Fields Visibily/GroupBy list. You'll be tweaking it for weeks if you do. ;)

[Jeff Young (jeyjey)]

For now I knocked up a poor-man's version with ASCII tree controls in the existing wxGrid. We can move it to an IconTextRenderer in 6.0 (or backport the IconTextRenderer from my 6.0 tree if folks think it's important).

[KiCad Janitor (kicad-janitor)]

Fixed in revision 9311393016e84dc31339b34209da721350f87b57
https://git.launchpad.net/kicad/patch/?id=9311393016e84dc31339b34209da721350f87b57