Item1726: CALC in EditTablePlugin causes errors during editing

Two old problems with CALC (SpreadSheetPlugin) in labels in EditTablePlugin are

• The CALCs are long and goof up the table with enormous field widths.
• During editing the CALC result causes an error (SpreadSheetPlugin is not robust against invalid or missing indata)

I have tried many things and the far best I have tried is to simply replace the entire CALC Macro by the static text CALC during editing.

These 4 letters take little space, and they make sense to the user that can guess that this is the CALC macro not being able to return anything during editing.

I will check in this now. Maybe someone can come up with a nice graphic or similar but until then this will do well.

We could also have returned a simple 0. But then - CALC does not always return a number. It can also be a string. So I prefer the CALC word or a small graphic.

The idea we once has with an non-editable text field was also tested and it was more confusing to the users I tested it on. They would try and alter the text and got confused instead. That proposal (my own) was not as good a solution as I first throught. I have used this CALC thing in a locally hacked ETP and it has been simple and successful.

-- KennethLavrsen - 15 Jun 2009

I have 3 additions:

1. Make it work in headers and footers
2. Make it work with multiple CALCs on 1 line
3. Make it possible to style with CSS

-- ArthurClemens - 15 Jun 2009