49402 - centering dialogs invoked by window.open

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: Message Display, defect, P3)

Description

[Scott MacGregor]

In mailnews, we have a lot of dialogs we bring up from JS using window.open.
Right now, these dialogs show up in the upper right hand corner of the screen.
You watch people drag the dialog down to th middle of the screen and then they
actually use it.

Some examples include the New Folder dialog, rename folder dialog, the
text/plaintext/html dialog in compose to just name a few....

It turns out to be quite trivial to at the very least force the dialog to be
centered on the screen by passing a flag in on the window.open call: "centerscreen".

With a little more work it might be easy to  even get it cenetered on the parent
window (which is what you really want).

the price is cheap and it makes the dialogs look so much more polished! I'm
really hoping mailtriage will give this a plus so I can go through and add this
flag.

Comment 1

[Scott MacGregor]

adding the beta3 keyword nomination. see my comments above for justification.
Maybe this kind of bug should get a UI keyword too?

Comment 2

[Scott MacGregor]

Even better, it turns out if your dialog pulls in dialogOverlay.xul, you get a
method: moveToAlertPosition which centers the dialog for you based on the parent
window that opened the dialog. You just need to call this method in your onload
handler for your dialog.

I just did it for the new folder dialog and it looks so much better.

If we plus this, we just need to get a list of the dialogs that show up in the
left hand corner (just noticed that search and filter dialogs need this too).
Then we can just add this one JS method call and voila....

Comment 3

[lchiang]

+, M21 per mail triage
Scott - m21 means that SusEng can help us with the bug (it's a way for them to 
do queries)

Comment 4

[Srilatha Moturi]

ccing myself

Comment 5

[Srilatha Moturi]

One problem with moveToAlertPosition, if the center of the parent window is off 
the screen then the new window that is being displayed is not accessible. I made 
changes to the moveToAlertPosition method such that the child window will be 
positioned on the screen in this case. I will attach my patch for the 
moveToAlertPosition. Can somone review it? 
Also if this looks good I will go ahead and fix all the dialogs that come under 
this category. I will compile and will post it sometime today.

Comment 6

[Srilatha Moturi]

Attachment: fix for moveToAlertPosition

Comment 7

[Scott MacGregor]

you should send your change to that method to [e-mail]. He's the owner
of that method. Nice catch!

Comment 8

[Srilatha Moturi]

Here's the list of dialogs that needs to be repositioned
If I am missing any please add to the list

Comment 9

[Srilatha Moturi]

Attachment: List of dialogs

Comment 10

[lchiang]

second pass: - per mail triage. 

srilatha - you can still work on this bug - if you have a patch/fix, please get 
the bug fix reviewd.  I'll assign this bug to you.

Comment 11

[Srilatha Moturi]

working on it. I will have a fix by end of today. 

Comment 12

[Srilatha Moturi]

ok Checked in the fixes.
Lisa, do I need to change the milestone on this bug.
Marking Resolved Fixed

Comment 13

[lchiang]

No need to change.  I'll change the - to a + though since you did fix this. 
Thanks for helping!

Comment 14

[Scott MacGregor]

thanks again for fixing this for us. It looks so much better with these dialogs
getting centered.

Comment 15

[Srilatha Moturi]

No problem. But if you guys run into any dialogs that I might have missed let me 
know.

Comment 16

[varada]

This looks better than before but I am not sure whether they are all centered.
The Addressbook dialogs are all centered and the Edit->MailFilter is ok but the
following are not exactly centered.
File->New->Account is on the left top corner;
Search->MailNewsMessages-> starts in the middle of the screen but the whole
dialog seems to run outside the right side of the screen.
Can some UI person verify this and close it?

Comment 17

[Alec Flett]

the overflowing of the search window is an existing bug.

Comment 18

[jglick]

I think the most important thing is that none of the dialogs open with part of 
them OFF the screen completely.  

AB Card and Filter Rules still open partly off the screen for me, but I believe 
putterman said this has something to do with using an old profile as opposed to 
wiping out everything and starting fresh.

Comment 19

[Navin Gupta]

verifying

Comment 20

[Navin Gupta]

Using commercial release build (2000092808) all the dialogs listed below do not
appear at the center of the screen. However an explanation for the search
Mail/News message and the Edit Card in Address book is in this bug report.
The position of File -> New Account remains to be answered to mark this bug
as verified.

win:
Mailnews window
-> search menu -> search Mail/News Messages
-> File menu -> New Account

mac/linux

MailNews
-> search menu -> search Mail/News Messages
-> File menu -> New Account

Address book
-> Edit menu -> Edit card

Comment 21

[esther]

Using branch builds dated 2000-10-04 on win98, mac and linux the File|New
Account dialog is fully on the screen and location seems OK.  Finishing the
verifying of this bug.  fixes were checked in before 9/21 no need for vtrunk.
Also note Search is still off the screen on the right bug alecf states there is
a separate bug for this.  Verified