[Development] Missing documentation makes QML ListView unusable

[Bache-Wiig Jens]

> 
> No. ListView is designed to support many interaction methods, not a
> specific interaction method with others being "custom things". Aside
> from the case where you want more than click-to-select in your
> MouseArea (which is probably the most common case, and would require
> overriding any default MouseArea), there's the case where the center
> item remains selected (and selection changes when the list scrolls),
> the case where the device has no pointer (and MouseAreas are just a
> waste) and the case where selection is not used (again, waste). Having
> a MouseArea "by default" would most likely lead to it being disabled
> in the majority of cases, on all platforms except desktop.
> 
> If you want something that provides conveniently the default user
> experience expected for a specific platform, look to the platform
> components instead of the GUI primitives. This argument will be a lot
> stronger once we finish the desktop components of course, but we're
> working on it :) .

Just to ad a little bit more information to this. ListView is a UI primitive and we have to be careful about creating too many differences between the platforms as people are building controls on top of it. The plan is to provide a convenience TableView control in 5.1 which will solve this issue for most use cases.

You can essentially think of it as an extended ListView with built in selection support, re-arrangable column headers, scroll bars and a mostly native look and feel. All of which would bring it a lot closer to the expected behaviour of the widget item views. 

Here is a video I made quite some time ago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-RI0sR2Y8c

I am still figuring out how to best handle the behaviour differences between touch and desktop but I believe on desktop we will by default only allow flicking by mouse wheel/touchpad and left button drags would select by default. On touch the default behaviour will probably be flick and tap to select instead.

Regards,
Jens