Colour coded output 2

In a previous post I discussed using colour to identify for the user the sources for the generated metadata. Whether it had come from the documents they had passed into the application or from one of the data collections. While I liked the idea I felt it was to complex which effectively defeated the whole reason for using it. So I dropped it and reverted back to plain black text.

However what is important for the user is to known whether or not the metadata is complete. By this I mean that those fields that are required to be filled are filled and some warning is passed to the user where this is not the case. I thought of using popup warnings that did not allow the user to export the metadata file (effectively complete the process) unless certain fields were filled in. Again this was too complex from a coding perspective and I felt was irritating to the user. There was also the fact that different repository and packaging systems don’t all follow the LOM standard explicitly.

Thinking back to the colour coding I decided to use that to provide none intrusive warnings to the user. The user readable output is colour coded red if a field is missing and essential to the LOM standard and grey if missing and none essential as viewed here. This works much better than the popups and also enables the user to decide whether or not to fill in the relevant feeds before exporting. Allowing them to tailor the metadata produced to what ever application they intend to use it with.