1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing apparatus which executes display control of a folder group using a hierarchical structure, a control method thereof, and a program.
2. Description of the Related Art
In order to express the structure of folders (directories) on an operation system using a GUI (Graphical User Interface), it is a common practice to display folder configurations having a parent-child relationship using a tree format.
A window system such as Microsoft Windows™ or the like also displays the hierarchical structure of folders on the left part of a window, and displays elements (folders and files) under a folder arbitrarily selected from the hierarchical structure.
In order to open a folder on a lower hierarchy, the user clicks a folder name or an icon which is allocated beside the folder name and is used to open/close the folder to display folders immediately under that folder.
In the display method of the folder hierarchical structure of such tree structure, when one hierarchy includes a very large number of subfolders, all of these subfolders cannot be displayed on the display region of a window. In this case, the user cannot recognize the whole folder hierarchical structure unless he or she operates a scroll bar displayed on the window.
Also, it is a common practice to copy or move a file displayed on the right part of a window by dragging and dropping that file into another folder. However, while a large number of folders are displayed on the left tree part of the window, the copy/move operability is poor.
A technique which improves the operability by displaying only a part of this folder hierarchical structure, and making a scroll operation using up, down, right, and left scroll buttons is available (for example, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2005-242944).
Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2005-242944 described above allows the user to scroll the display contents at once using a hierarchy jump button and list jump button. However, since only some hierarchies are displayed, it is difficult for the user to recognize the whole folder hierarchies. In particular, if there are a large number of folders on a lower hierarchy, the user can hardly recognize the configurations of folders on an upper hierarchy, thus impairing the operability.
As described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,636,250, upon selection of the “Name” relationship function in FIG. 7, a sub-list 350 of icons is condensed using arrangement icons 210-15 to 210-18, as shown in FIG. 8. When one of these arrangement icons is expanded, it is displayed like a sub-list 360 in FIG. 8. With this U.S. Pat. No. 6,636,250, the number of arrangement icons and the number of icons which belong to each arrangement icon are determined by computing the square root of the number of icons of the sub-list 350. For example, when there are 52 icons, they are condensed using seven series arrangement icons and one additional series arrangement icon.
In this way, U.S. Pat. No. 6,636,250 determines the number of arrangement icons by computing the square root of the number of icons, but does not consider the size of a window that displays the icons.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds