[kepler-dev] Additional menu items

[Dan Higgins]

Matthew,
    Congratulations on getting the new Kepler menu layout working (and 
the ability to change the configuration)!

    However, it looks likes we left out a couple of menu items that I 
just recently learned to appreciate! --- namely 'Instantiate Attribute' 
and 'Instantiate Entity' under the 'Graph' menu.

I must admit that I did not understand just what these menu items were 
used for until recently (and I might have suggested to Laura that we 
leave them out in Kepler).

'Instantiate Attribute' allows the user to add attributes to the 
workflow by name. This allows one to add attributes that are not in the 
Kepler Actor Ontology tree to a workflow! (And we have not included all 
the ones in Ptolemy.) Similarly, 'Instantiate Entity' allows one to add 
actors; there are many Ptolemy actors/directories that we have not 
included in our actor ontology and I have already been asked by several 
users how to add such actors to workflows without having to recompile 
the whole Kepler system. It also turns out that whole new actor classes 
can be added using this menu item (i.e. new classes).

So I think these two menu items should be included in the new menu 
layout, probably in the Workflow menu. Maybe Laura will want to change 
the menu item names?


Dan