575413 - Add toolbar buttons for "Convert To Event.../Task..." to Thunderbird mail toolbar

Status: NEW

(Calendar :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Joachim Herb]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; de; rv:1.9.2.6) Gecko/20100625 Firefox/3.6.6
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; de; rv:1.9.2.4) Gecko/20100608 Lightning/1.0b2pre Mnenhy/0.8.2 Thunderbird/3.1 ID:20100608023648

Currently there is a drop down menu in the folder pane with menu entries "Convert To" -> "Event..."/"Task..." to convert an email to a task or event entry in lightning. 

It is proposed to add two toolbar buttons to the mail toolbar palette (or perhaps also to the header pane toolbar palette) which also provide this functionality. 

If its done inside lightning it would just be some xul code like this:
<toolbarpalette id="MailToolbarPalette">
  <toolbarbutton
  class="toolbarbutton-1"
  id="button-calendar-convert-event"
  label="&calendar.context.convertmenu.event.label;"
  tooltiptext="&calendar.context.convertmenu.event.label;"
  oncommand="calendarCalendarButtonDNDObserver.onDropMessage(gFolderDisplay.selectedMessage);" />
  <toolbarbutton
  class="toolbarbutton-1"
  id="button-calendar-convert-task"
  label="&calendar.context.convertmenu.task.label;"
  tooltiptext="&calendar.context.convertmenu.task.label;"
  oncommand="calendarTaskButtonDNDObserver.onDropMessage(gFolderDisplay.selectedMessage);" />
</toolbarpalette>
(and choosing some icons for the button in a css file and perhaps use new strings).

How long would it take to get this into Lightning (if I supplied a patch)? I got a proposal for my add-on CompactHeader (https://addons.mozilla.org/thunderbird/addon/13564) to add these buttons but I think it would make more sense to add them to Lightning itself. Otherwise CompactHeader had to check if Lightning is installed (by the way: how could this be accomplished?)


Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Simon Paquet [:sipaq]]

Herb,
I suggest that you provide a patch here in the bug and ask Philipp (:fallen) for a review. He is normally quite fast with reviews and will tell you early on, whether he likes your patch or not.

Thanks for offering to contribute to Lightning BTW. Hopefully we will see more of that in the future...

Comment 2

[Stefan Sitter [:ssitter]]

This is probably not needed if someone volunteers to work on bug 459641.

When doing a patch with mail toolbar buttons don't forget to enable/disable them based on the tab content, i.e. in mail tab it might convert the selected message (or the selected event/task in Today Pane), in a web tab it probably should be disabled, ...

Comment 3

[Joachim Herb]

Attachment: First patch adding to buttons to the mail toolbar

Here is a first patch which adds the two buttons.

What I do not understand is comment #2. What do you mean with web tab? Could you point me to a example implementing this enable/disable functionality?

Comment 4

[Joachim Herb]

Attachment: This time hopefully with the binary diffs for the new button icons

Comment 5

[Stefan Sitter [:ssitter]]

There are other tabs that show e.g. local or remote web pages. Built-in examples can be opened from menu "Help > What's New" or menu "Help > About Thunderbird > About Your Rights | Contributors".

Comment 6

[Joachim Herb]

Attachment: Add observer/command to enable/disable the buttons

This patch "copies" the enable/disable state of the printer preview menu entry (in the file menu), because it shows exactly the right behavior:
It is only enabled, if exactly *one* message is selected or a mail is displayed in the active tab/window.
Unfortunately the cmd_printpreview cannot be used for the buttons here, because it is only updated automatically, if the file menu is clicked.

I contacted the author of the LightningButton add-on (https://addons.mozilla.org/thunderbird/addon/91129/):
If this patch were accepted in Lightning itself, I could provide extend it to include also his buttons. Would this make sense?

(On the other hand, plan B is to add the here proposed buttons to that add-on, if they were not accepted in Lightning).

Comment 7

[Stefan Sitter [:ssitter]]

Lightning 1.0b2 already contains built-in buttons for calendar and task tab that can be added to the main toolbar.

Comment 8

[Joachim Herb]

I know, but there are two other buttons in LightningButton now:
Add new task/new event. Actually quite simple, you just don't need to open the calendar/task tab. (I guess the description at AMO is not up to date).

The two buttons of LightningButton to open the task/event tabs also closes them, if you click on them (and the corresponding tab is the currently visible). I am not sure, if this is ergonomically meaningful?!?

Comment 9

[Joachim Herb]

If you want to test the buttons: They have been added to version 1.4 of LightningButton (not yet reviewed on AMO):
https://addons.mozilla.org/thunderbird/addon/91129/versions/

Comment 10

[Philipp Preißer-Kewisch [:Fallen][☁️📆]]

Herb, sorry for the long delay in review. I'm a bit undecided here. Back some time ago we removed a buch of buttons from the toolbar since we were thinking that Thunderbird would change its toolbar to a very minimalistic one (known as "exptoolbar").

The problem with the current toolbar is that many of the actions available in buttons are not necessarily global over all tabs. The notion is to move tab-specific commands into the UI of the respective tab and keep a very minimal set in the global toolbar. 

Since this hasn't really happened yet, it might be sensible to add some toolbarbuttons back in, but we should really make a firm decision on which buttons should stay and which should go. Also I think we shouldn't add any buttons by default, but leave users that want to customize their toolbar the chance. We should really keep the amount of work for such a bug low. If adding a certain toolbarbutton requires large and complicated hacks, we should leave it out.

If we start out with buttons to convert to event/task, people that don't use this feature will likely complain: You have a buttons for such a simple thing like converting to event/task, but why on earth don't you have a button to do xyz!?

Herb, maybe you could do us a favor and look through the buttons we had in 0.9, list them here, and propose a subset that make sense for this version.

I'd also enjoy a further opinion from someone with more UI experience than I have if the above makes sense.

Comment 11

[Philipp Preißer-Kewisch [:Fallen][☁️📆]]

I'm not sure if this was made clear enough, but what ssitter was proposing in the comments above is that it may be sufficient to allow the user to drag an email onto the Calendar/Task button, which should also convert the email to an event or task.

If we do take this as a toolbar button, I think its better kept in the mail headerpane toolbar.

Comment 12

[Philipp Preißer-Kewisch [:Fallen][☁️📆]]

Comment on attachment 456482 [details] [diff] [review]
Add observer/command to enable/disable the buttons

Taking the patch off of my review queue for now, lets have a ui-decision first.

Comment 13

[Bryan Clark (DevTools PM) [:clarkbw]]

Adding andreas who's going to take over the review here

Comment 14

[Andreas Nilsson (:andreasn)]

Comment on attachment 456482 [details] [diff] [review]
Add observer/command to enable/disable the buttons

Seems the patch had bitrotted a bit as <popup> is now <menupopup> in messenger-toolbar-overlay.xul

Apart from that, it seems the covert to task and convert to event icons are missing in the customize toolbar dialog.

Not sure if we want to put these in the message header as well or not.
* On the plus side, it's closer to the message it acts upon.
* On the minus, we're short on space there and other things are risking to get covered. Maybe put it under the "other actions" button?

Comment 15

[Andreas Nilsson (:andreasn)]

Attachment: screenshot of missing icons (linux)

Comment 16

[Nikolaus Filus]

Hi,

I wanted to ask, if this is still on the todo list for current/next versions?

There is an addon (LightningButton) offering the function, but it would be nice to have that by default.

Comment 17

[Matt]

I wandered into this bug following https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1238356

A user interface is required for open emails and as the add-on does not work at all with reading in a new window for those that choose that mail reading option.  Why we do not use the same toolbar in the window and tab I have no idea, but clearly they are not the same. (Is there a bug for that?)