No-Op Buttons/Actions in Glamorous Toolkit for the Win

2025/01/17

One of the foundations of Moldable Development is ad-hoc creation of many small custom tools/views. Sometimes we don't need a whole view when we want to have a single piece of data easily accessible.

When a Custom View is Too Much

Although custom views are great, and the more I practice moldable development, the more views I create, sometimes we care about a single piece of information in a specific context that might best be represented in some other way.

Custom views are usually the easiest way for one to grasp moldable development: we have a domain object and when we inspect it, we want to see more relevant things than a list/tabular view of all it's slots (internal variables) and their values. Apart from custom views, a moldable environment (in this case Glamorous Toolkit) can provide other extension points:

• Moldable Examples: Explorable/Composable tests

• Moldable Searches: define how to search for your domain objects both in the global spotter and in the context of your domain objects and collection classes.

• Moldable Coder Add-Ons: Adding buttons and context menu items to coders

• Moldable Stylers: Adding custom syntax highlighting and styling, including inline graphical elements and buttons/dropdowns

• Moldable Debuggers: Adding custom views/UI to specific exceptions

• Moldable Actions: Adding buttons/dropdowns to an object inspector

The last one can be pretty useful to run pieces of code that one may frequently run from an object scoped playground. By running the code query below, one can see how prevalent they are inside GT.

#gtAction gtPragmas | #gtClassAction gtPragmas

When a No-Op Action is all We Need

Below are two examples I built recently:

- LePage>>#gtWordCountFor: gtWordCountFor: anAction <gtAction> ^ anAction button priority: 1; label: (((self allChildrenSnippetsMatching: [ :aSnippet | aSnippet isTextSnippet and: [ (aSnippet ast parts size = 1 and: [ aSnippet ast parts first isKindOf: LeHeaderNode ]) not ] ]) collect: [ :each | each string substrings size ]) ifEmpty: [ 0 ] ifNotEmpty: [ :notEmpty | notEmpty sum ]) asString , ' words'; action: [ ]

- TtEventCollection>>#gtTrackedDaysFor:context: gtTrackedDaysFor: anAction context: aContext <gtAction> | isSingleCategory | isSingleCategory := self groupedByCategory keys size = 2. ^ anAction button priority: 0.25; label: (self groupedByDay keys in: [ :days | | firstDay lastDay trackedDays totalDays | firstDay := days min. lastDay := days max. trackedDays := days size. totalDays := (days max - days min) days + 1. isSingleCategory ifTrue: [ | totalTrackedDays | totalTrackedDays := ((aContext navigation previousContext isNil or: [ (aContext navigation previousContext object isKindOf: TtEventCollection) not ]) ifTrue: [ self rootCollection ] ifFalse: [ aContext navigation previousContext object ]) groupedByDay keys size. trackedDays asString , '/' , totalTrackedDays asString , ' tracked (' , (trackedDays / totalTrackedDays * 100 roundTo: 1) asString , '%)' ] ifFalse: [ trackedDays asString , '/' , totalDays asString , ' tracked (' , (trackedDays / totalDays * 100 roundTo: 1) asString , '%)' ] ])

The first one just displays the word count of a Lepiter page (excluding non-text snippets as well as snippets that are just headings). The second one is more niche and idiosyncratic to a package I built and use daily. I track and categorize my time in GT and this tells me the percentage of days I track and when looking at a single category, the ratio of days I do such categorized activities over the total tracked days. This can for example tell me what percentage of days I work out (not all).

Both of these are quick pieces of data that are useful at a glance in very specific contexts, but not relevant otherwise. Adding a custom view just for this data seems like overkill and in a class like LePage LeContent subclass: #LePage instanceVariableNames: 'type latestEditTime uid editHistory' classVariableNames: '' package: 'Lepiter-Core-Model' which already has many views is not worth it. When I click these buttons they do nothing (for now) and I'm okay with that. Wouldn't want to clutter an object/class's 'header' with a bunch of no-op buttons but in small doses, works for me and that is how you keep an environment moldable.

To wrap up, wrote this quickly in one sitting, filing under 'Today I Learned', and how many words are we clocking at? A quick glance is all I needed for the answer.