Right-click menu on layers

[alukach]

I think the ability to right-click on a layer and select operations would provide a more natural interface. When right-clicking, they would view a menu of "layer operations". Operations that come to mind:

• Rename
• Alter layer style (see Style layers in layerlist #126)
• Alter layer properties (see Store / edit operation settings  #140)
• Zoom to layer
• Zoom to selection

I struggle to come up with a good rule of what operations should go in the top menu bar and which should go as a right-click menu. I'm thinking operations that alters the state of an existing layer should go in the right-click menu. Anything that produces a new layer or performs analysis on a selection of layers should remain in the upper menu bar. Basically, the menu bar is for things that run ON layers, right-click is for things that happen TO layers... if that makes any sense.

I could also see the Save operations going in the right-click menu (for some reason, to me it feels a bit out of place in the top bar), but I don't feel completely confident about that.

[mapsam]

I agree - the right-click would be much more useful to show ON layers instead of having a mixture of operations on the upper menu.

I experimented with this for a bit and using this as an entry point and it seemed like we could get there. We'd want to add a new menu space in the AppController that would define any operations within the menu.

[alukach]

Yeah, I skimmed through the first link that came up from google, it seems pretty do-able. I like our menus and definitely think we could make some minor modifications to the Menu class to allow it to be a right-click menu. Agreed that they should be defined in AppController

[mapsam]

As we add more geo operations, I'm also starting to wonder if geo should take on it's own menu type. Potentially something that sits along the layerlist sidebar, rather than a main menu. Honestly if we can move away from menu-bar menus that would be awesome. This also would require making icons for each geoprocessing type function, assuming the example below. This would give a really awesome feedback as users select different layers - you could see the options change in opacity depending on their availability.

Here's what I'm thinking (assume the geoprocessing menu bar at the top no longer exists):

[alukach]

Yeah, I think a side bar could be a good idea.

[mapsam]

Going to make this another issue #151

[mapsam]

Right click context menus were added in #211!