Redesign

Things were plodding along fairly well until I tried to start working on multiple-selection-dragging . I got stuck, seriously stuck. I couldn't find a clean way to handle this. Things got even worse when I started thinking about how I would implement keyframes and editing markers. I decided to go back to the drawing board:
Basically, after taking a few days a few days to deal with personal matters, I started redesigning the implementation of the advanced UI from scratch. I haven't written a single line of code.

The inspiration that I hit upon recently is the idea of a Control Point, which is a generalized mapping between something the user can see and manipulate to an arbitrary property belonging to some object in the model. The idea is that for every property in PiTiVi core that you want to control, you have a control point to control it. In addition, when properties in the advanced UI change, the control points update their values as well. This way, objects in the UI are actually defined either as control points or as sets of control points. All the user interaction will be routed through a central Selection object, and then dispatched to all the selected control points. This supports everything from multi-selection dragging to handling undo/redo.

Where this idea goes wrong is when you have an object defined as a relationship between control points that is not one-to-one. For example, the relationship between the start/duration properties of a TimelineObject and the Start/End points of a ComplexTimelineObject is not one-to-one. If you adjust the start or end point of the object independently, both the start and the duration values change. If you adjust the Start/End points together, only the Start property changes. This is a consequence of the mathematical relationship between the out-point of the object and the source's start/duration. I'm not quite sure where to go from here, but I think the best course of action is to provide a layer of indirection between the control points and properties. If you have a proxy object which has an in-point and an out-point, which in turn computes start/duration, for example, all the UI Selection object needs to care about are the In/Out control points.