prevents select on click when userSelectAction is none

[Aierie]

No description provided.

[oleksandr-danylchenko]

That logic is already covered in the parent @annotorious/annotorious package. Even though the selection.userSelection will be invoked, the actual selection state will always remain empty. See this source

[oleksandr-danylchenko]

Also, we cannot compare the userSelectAction with the enum value directly, because the userSelectAction can also be an expression: ((a: T) => UserSelectAction)

[Aierie]

Yes - what I'm trying to achieve is to control the selection myself, described in #153

[Aierie]

I'll work on the userSelectAction expression, thanks! I just realised this - sorry, am pretty new here.

[rsimon]

Good point. Yes, indeed the core package already checks this against the current userSelectionAction (value or function).

[rsimon]

If I understand correctly, you are trying to implement multi-selection (CTRL-Click?) behavior. That's not supported across the interface yet. Which means there are probably some gotchas involved. Nonetheless: the selection API already supports a list of annotations (rather than just a single selected one) as you saw.

[Aierie]

Yes, I'm trying to do multi-selection behaviour. The selection API does support a list of annotations, but I have to set userSelectAction to NONE if I want to control it myself* from clicks. And when I do that, clicking on any annotation will clear the list of annotations that my program has selected

[Aierie]

I guess - my expectation of inertness is that this default clause does nothing. But if there's important reasons for it to clear the array, I'll find a workaround, thanks!

[rsimon]

Hm, so as far as I can see (tried just now) NONE does already work as designed. If you click an annotation, the annotator does not fire the select event.

I guess for now, it might be easier for you to manage your own selection list, outside of the annotator. An "official" implementation would have to happen in the @annotorious/core package. It's already planned in here but, alas, not yet implemented:
https://github.com/annotorious/annotorious/blob/main/packages/annotorious-core/src/state/Selection.ts#L61-L80

The idea is that the userSelect function would handle things by itself: check for the CTRL modifier key, and then add the annotation to the list rather than replace it in these lines.

The other issue is, of course, the clickAnnotation event which is supposed to fire independently of the selection, for all annotations, regardless of the current useSelectAction setting. But that, unfortunately, isn't implemented yet. (But would also have to be handled in the SelectionHandler.)

[rsimon]

I guess - my expectation of inertness is that this default clause does nothing.

I guess that's something that might be worth discussing. In principle, my view is: clicking an inert annotation would be considered the same as clicking on empty space, which is supposed to clear the selection. What's not covered in the current code, of course, is that you might click an inert annotation that overlaps a non-inert one. In this case, I'd expect the non-inert one to get selected (and the inert one to get ignored). The current code, however, would simply clear the selection as you say.

[rsimon]

BTW: if your project is something you can share, I'd love to see it. It's still a bit early days for this library. But I'm interested in seeing as many different use cases & getting it improved as best as possible.

[Aierie]

Okay, will share once I've cleaned it up enough to use! It is a tool for doing bottom-up qualitative data synthesis that puts a lot of importance on the raw quotes, following Indi Young's method.

I was originally hacking around with RecogitoJS, but realised the successor checked these boxes:

• Better rendering to avoid awkward UI when applying certain custom styles to annotation spans (for example ::before pseudo-elements)
• Undo/redo
• More control over selection

So thanks! This saves me a bunch of work while making the code cleaner. I'll continue using @recogito/text-annotator-js, but will probably store selection state as a property in the annotation for now.

[rsimon]

Sounds great, thanks!