Some user comments from the August 2013 RiverWare User Group Meeting
Phil Weinstein, edit 8-28-2013 (b); Minor notes on development: 10-19-2013.

(See also, especially, the list started by Patrick and augmented during the final session of the meeting. The list below has some redundant items).

(1) HTML (or some level of Rich Text) for Object and Slot description text.

• Terry Dawson (USBR) emphasized her significant use of these comment blocks, including URLs.
• Request from Shane Coors.

(2) [Brad] ... When renaming Accounts (e.g. with the new capability to rename a whole bunch of Accounts in one operation), could related Supplies be renamed too?

• This might require some heuristics, as the user may use an informal alternate naming convention, e.g. manually abbreviating certain parts of a supply's name.
• One possibility is (optional) automatic renaming of ONLY supplies having names which currently match the user-configured default supply names. Corrected names for such supplies could easily be applied. Ref: http://cadswes2.colorado.edu/~philw/2010/Accounting/DefaultSplyName/

(3) [Brad] ... In the new Input Aggregation function (optionally applied when changing to a larger timestep size), Brad would like support for "Hourly to Daily".

(4) [Steve] ... GUS slot selector: width of the middle (SimObj) panel is often too narrow (in models with very long object names), and not adjustable.

• It's true. (But when needed, the content of that panel IS at least scrollable). We don't provide splitters between the horizontally arranged panels. (BTW, there is a vertical splitter for the two ROWS of panels, e.g. when selecting an Account Slot or Supply). This geometry management is tricky, and GUS does a "pretty good" job in general (I would have said. But actually not good enough). The problem with adding horizontal splitters is that the default automatic geometry management may be worse -- so users may ALWAYS have to fuss with the splitters -- and it's tricky when there is more than one splitter. (And the Windows 7 style makes the splitter controls invisible!). But with sufficient care, we could do a reasonable job. (We have to basically do the whole thing ourselves, on not let Qt do any of it).

(5) Persistence of rule priority numbers in series, in a saved model file. David mentioned that we know that these are not persistent for accounting series slots. BUT APPARENTLY, those numbers are also sometimes lost from physical series slots. [Maybe Shane or John Carron, actually a few people]. [See Patrick's e-mail of 10-17-2013].

(6) Request: For Export Copy on series data, option to include (an export column for) Rule Priority. (We might as well also support an optional an export column for Flag letter).

(7) [Andrew]: More consistent support for shortcuts.

• We have revisited this, and the common editor dialogs (slots, etc) are in good shape.
• The example Andrew gave -- the Diagnostics Output Window, needing both Clear Messages and Close Window -- is a tricky one for TWO reasons:
  1. We very much want to have widgets in the same horizontal space as the menubar. So this window has a "novel" (strange, custom-) menubar implementation. But we can revisit it.
  2. The output window is also deployable as a PANEL along the bottom of the SCT. (So even if shortcuts were implemented -- using a different "novel" implementation -- they would collide with the SCT's shortcuts. We would have to do something about this).

(8) Persistent RiverWare Workspace size and position. We need to support also the "Maximized" state -- the current result is bad. [Addressed as Gnats 5384, 9-27-2013, RW 6.4].

ALSO, some of Phil's observations:

(1) The appearance of "NONE" in especially series displays (open series slot dialogs, edit account dialog, SCT) is confounding -- especially when not accompanied by other series having meaningful units. Some possibilities:

1. Global option to not show "NONE" for units in slot displays (in cases where the accompanying scale is 1.0).
2. Support optional entity unit description text on slots and slot columns (e.g. "Stage", "Enabled") -- possibly only for slots and slot columns having the "NO UNITS" unit type.

(2) Sum of series slots on same-named Accounts (on different objects).

• The sort of Sum computation provided in the Object Account Summary Dialog (of a chosen slot across many accounts on a single object) could perhaps be applied to similar relationships. For example: the sum of a chosen slots (notably Storage) across all accounts having the SAME NAME (on different objects) in the model.

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