Proposal: Statistics in Subsurface

[Willem Ferguson]

I have been thinking  a long time about graphical statistics facilities 
for Subsurface, that is presenting the dive statistics as bar graphs or 
other types of graphics.

1) In doing so, I looked at the yearly statistics as implemented at the 
moment and realised that this is actually a pretty comprehensive 
statistical framework and that it would be inefficient to write a 
separate code base for graphical statistical presentation. The current 
code for statistics is somewhat complicated but perfectly workable.

2) The current statistics tab, accessible from the Notes Panel (i.e. the 
statistics tab adjacent to the Information tab) actually largely 
duplicates what can be obtained from the Yearly statistics panel. The 
only difference is that, currently, the Yearly statistics calculates 
results based on the whole dive log, while the Statistic tab presents 
results for all the dives selected on the dive list. However, 
yearlystatisticsmodel.cpp already already has code that in principle 
allows calculations for the *selected* dives in the dive log: it is just 
not activated as far as I can see.

3) The main problem with the yearly statistics is that the table is 
pretty large. In order to make this more user friendly, my proposal is 
to break the yearly statistics table into smaller chunks and move them 
over to the Statistics tab.

4) This would bring all the statistics together in one place. Seeing 
that the info in the Statistics tab has no one-to-one connection with 
the dive profile being displayed, the question arises: should the 
statistics tab not be elevated to the main menu rather than a tab within 
the Notes Panel ??

5) What I am thinking of is to break up the results for yearly 
statistics and move them over to the statistics tab. The interface may 
perhaps be a dropdown list corresponding to all the headings on the 
left-hand side of the yearly statistics. Another dropdown list would 
have information similar to the column headings of the yearly 
statistics. One would then select an item from each of the dropdown 
lists and this would bring up the relevant numbers as well as a 
graphical representation of these numbers. The min, max and average 
numbers currently shown in the statistics tab needs to be made 
accessible in some way, but probably integrated with the above 
somewhere. This would mean that the existing statistical infrastructure 
largely remains as is, it is just the UI for showing the results that 
changes.

Does this look like a viable approach at all?

Kind regards,

willem



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