Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] Composite expert statistics

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From: Ulf Lamping <ulf.lamping@xxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 08 Nov 2005 21:48:55 +0100
Greg Morris wrote:

>> As I've done it e.g. in the Statistics/Conversations, please add the
>> number of occurrences to the tab labels, e.g.: "Errors: 11"
Done

Two things remaining :-)
if zero items are "shown", the tab label should display "Errors: 0" and not "Errors:" IMHO that's just more intuitive More important: if you close a capture file, the counts don't go back to zero

That dialog is already looking much better now :-)

>> Idea for further development:
>> What about the idea of combining both dialogs into one e.g. by adding a
>> new "Details" or "Log" tab to your dialog?
Well, I have thought a lot about this one. I would like to see both the expert and composite expert included in one display window.

Same idea as mine, but we should keep an eye to not slow down things on large capture files ...

I'm sometimes working with capture files 50MB+ and I had some work with keeping "my" dialog at a reasonable speed to still be usable.

Much like how Ethereal currently displays the protocol tree in the decode window with the plus symbol to expand the item to show the subitems. For example... Group Protocol Info Count
[+] Sequence        TCP           Connection Request             2
When expanded it would show... Group Protocol Info Count
[-] Sequence          TCP           Connection Request             2
Packet 10 Packet 25

Hmmm, that's really a different way than what I was thinking about. My idea was to keep track of the time sequence of the items occurred (much like in the packet list). Some (a lot of?) items will only make real sense to understand if you see the related items in the right sequence. So the sequence in which the items appear might be important, which will get lost in the way to display them as a tree.

What I don't want to say is that the tree like display doesn't have it's own reasons, so we simply might want to have both and probably keeping them in separate dialogs. Just unsure for now and no time to do deep thinking ...

Maybe even more information could be presented in the subtree data. But for now, not wanting to step on your toes and try to move your work into mine,

Well, in my eyes this is a community work. The only think that should be prevented is to remove features that some people really uses.

I have included a new menu item when clicking on the packet within the composite expert info window. The new menu item is "Go to first occurance". This actually does the same as your expert info by positioning the trace within the Ethereal main window to the first occurance of the packet selected in the trace. So, if the user was actually wanting to see the packet that was being referenced in the window, all they need to do is highlight the expert info item, then right click and select the new option "Go to first occurance". I know this might not be a very good term to use but it was one that came off the top of my head and seemed applicable.

What's the difference to "Find Frame/Find Frame/Selected"?!? Beside the deep menu tree, of course, and beside the fact that it should be called "Find Packet/Find Packet/Selected"...

Even you as a person who really had some deep thoughts about the topic, doesn't seem to realize the functionality of the context menu items. That's a good indication that the current state of context menus just doesn't show a good usability. Having a deep tree with three levels wouldn't be a good usability design for the main menu, in a context menu it's complete overkill.

I suspect that you simply copied this context menu and didn't really understand what it's all about. However, you're in a good tradition ...

I could despair on the current statistic dialog usability in this and other regards :-(((

That's my weekly (monthly?) rant on the statistics dialogs usability, please don't take this personally ...

Attached is a complete set of files. Since they are not checked in I didn't want to send a diff from the last email, just in case you had a different version for one of my other uploads.

I didn't even had a look at your code, so no problem with this.

Regards, ULFL

P.S: You don't need to send me a separate mail, just send it to the devlist ...