[imp] Removing "Save" and "Undo" from preference group

[Joshua E Warchol]

On Thu, Mar 28, 2002 at 02:45:07PM -0600, Eric Rostetter wrote:
> > On the options page I've added a group under "Your Information" called
> > "Configure Mailbox". In there I list two options, "Out-of-Office Message" and
> > "Email Forwarding". Each of these is a link to another PHP page that does
> > all the work. 
> 
> This sounds like a misapplication of the prefs system.  If you would, for
> example, save the "out of office" message in prefs, that would be cool.
> But it is not meant to be a link page, which appears to be how you want to
> use it.

I would love to use IMP's pref storage for saving the out-of-office message,
but unfortunately that would never work. My autoresponder system is on another
server, and is LDAP based. My IMP preferences are stored on a seperate (and
geographically remote) MySQL server. 

But from a UI-design perspective this functionality works very very well in
the "Options" window. I expect to set my autoresponder message in the same
place I set my sig and my full name. It makes great sense. The user's I've
shown this to love it, and don't like the idea of having to go to a different
sight to configure those. 

> > But on this page I've got the standard "Save","Undo Changes" and "Return to
> > Options" buttons. I only want the "Return to Options" button to be there, as
> > there are no preferences to save on that page. Can this be done?
> 
> That's my point.  Why use the preferences system if you are not going to
> set any preferences?  Isn't this using the wrong interface for the job?
> 
> I understand that prefs will let you do this, but it seems like the wrong
> use of the prefs system.

I don't want to use the perferences system so much as I want to use the
options window within IMP's interface. I could store this information within
IMP's preferences and export it to LDAP, but only if there was a way for
the export to be triggered when the user updated the information within
IMP (which I don't see). Also, I allow the user to manage forwarding of their
email, and that can also be configured by an Company Administrator from the
account management site. 

I'll take it there is no way to do this. prefs.php handles all preferences
the same way. 

-- 
Joshua Warchol
UNIX Systems Administrator
DSL.net