My suggestion a while back was to provide a pop-up dialog that allowed
the user to mark a range/set of packets. This range marking would be
similar to what you suggested, i.e. allow "1-4,8,10-50", as well as
options to "mark all" or "unmark all". In this case, the user would be
able to flexibly and quickly control marking, and then use the existing
"save marked" option to save this set of packets.
I think this makes the most sense, and a "print marked packets" option
could fairly easily be created, which would be a bit more modular (and
intuitive, IMO). This would also be far simpler than some of the other
suggestions.
The "save "(or print)" between first and last packet" option is just bad
UI design, again IMHO, and not flexible enough.
One question - what other current or potential uses does packet marking
allow?
We'd also need to clean up the way marking affects coloring of packets
in the packet list (well, we really do anyway).
Ian
Biot Olivier wrote:
I partally agree. I'm in favor of decoupling how the end-user interacts with
the system and the way the system is implemented. Anyway, I think we will
move to a more powerful selection mechianism in a stepwise manner.
The questions I have, are all related to how intuitive the UI is to a human.
For this reason and because it makes sense to me to decouple dfilter from
selection criteria (although the implementation does not allow full
separation of both).
Additionally, If one wants to print/save only a selection of packets, why
wouldn't we let the user enter the ranges, just like it is already
implemented in various SW products in the "Print pages" widget? I think it'd
be much mode interesting if an end-user could specify ranges like "-20",
"25-40", "120-" or a combination of those:
( ) Specify ranges: [ -20 35-37 45 78- ]
Would then select only packets (first) to 20, 35 to 37, 45, 78 to (last).
And even then, it would still make sense to apply the dfilter on demand for
the entered selection.
Regards,
Olivier