investigate startup sequence and ability to load previous session

[caver456]

Reported by Steve 4/25/24 - certainly some of this is a training issue, but maybe there are other improvements to make:

There have been several people getting confused with the dialog choices for creating a new session. Also, if you want to connect to the previous session (use of F4) (got dropped out of radiolog for some reason) that is at another step of the startup (after starting a new,session).

Several people think (including me) that it would be good to integrate the ability of re-connecting to a prior session in the startup dialog. Some other syntaxes might help understand the other options, too.

[caver456]

Guessing this confusion is mainly or entirely regarding the Continued Incident dialog.

Let's definitely look to see if the 1) wording or 2) startup workflow should be improved, but:

Yes it can be confusing if it's not expected and if the operator hasn't been trained on it and if there's no time or motivation to slow down and read it, but, it's there for a reason: on multi-op searches, even seasoned operators would consistently forget to set the OP# (fairly important but not critical) and the next clue# (VERY important - as determined during the Kiely Rodni search when clue numbers restarted to 1 each day) based on previous OPs. Changing the clue# in the clue dialog is easy to do but is definitely obscure and easy to forget at the time of the first clue of the new OP.

Here's the continued incident dialog right now - keeping in mind that this dialog only shows up if there are any sessions on the same computer within the last four days:

If the user responds No, which can just be done by hitting Escape, or Enter since No is the default, or if there were no sessions on the same computer in the last four days in which case the continued incident dialog never appears, the next dialog to come up is the Options dialog:

Followed by the Log In dialog:

If the previous session was not shut down cleanly (i.e. the program crashed, or the operator accidentally closed the shell window, or the power was lost), then this dialog shows up immediately on startup, before any of the dialogs shown above:

If the operator answers Yes to restore: previous files are loaded; the continued incident and options dialogs are not shown, but the operator login dialog is shown. If any errors are encountered during the attempted restore, another message box is shown to notify the operator.

If the operator answers No to restore: all of the 'standard' startup dialogs are shown in the same sequence as above.

What if the operator incorrectly / quickly hits No or Cancel on the offer to restore? After finishing with the 'standard' startup dialogs, typing F6 will offer to do the same action as the restore-after-crash:

It looks like the suggestion was to add a button somewhere in these dialogs to load a previous session from a selected directory? Right now, that's done by typing F4:

It's not clear if adding a button somewhere to do that would make sense in context of any of the dialogs mentioned above: it probably doesn't make sense in the continued incident dialog, because that dialog doesn't always show up; it probably doesn't make sense in the options dialog since it's not really an 'option' (though, the 'FleetSync Send Console' button is arguably out of context in the options dialog too - it just needed a home somewhere); it doesn't makes sense in the operator login dialog since it's clearly unrelated.

All of the F-key shortcuts can be seen by opening the help dialog (F1, or the question mark icon at the top right):

All in all: is this just a training issue, or, is there work to be done here? The middle ground would be to make a video on this workflow. There's a video on the operator login dialog, but, not on the entire startup workflow especially including the continued incident dialog. This should probably happen. Could either make a new issue to do this, or, change the name of this issue. Will solicit feedback from a few operators. it might help to better understand the scenario/s that caused confusion - was the confusion just due to haste / not having the time to slow down and read it, or, was it something else?