[kepler-dev] [Bug 2964] - Change RExpression plotting actors to allow custom axis and title labels

[bugzilla-daemon@ecoinformatics.org]

http://bugzilla.ecoinformatics.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2964





------- Comment #1 from leinfelder at nceas.ucsb.edu  2008-02-11 13:45 -------
using R "attributes" of objects, we can add some metadata to the variables as
the tokens are made available in R.
In the case of the ScatterPlot-RExpression actor that has 2 input ports named
"Independent" and "Dependent" the X- and Y-axis  are labeled with those
variable names.
If we included a "name" attribute for each of those objects, we could use that
attribute as the axis label when calling plot() in R.
I propose using the upstream (source) output port name as the "name" attribute.
 In the case of an EML actor that provides two vectors of data (columns) for
the ScatterPlot, each axis would be labeled with the column name that provided
the data being plotted.

The R for creating the graph would look like this:
plot(Independent, Dependent, xlab=attributes(Independent)$name,
ylab=attributes(Dependent)$name)

If the R actor class does make this "name" attribute available to script
authors in Kepler, there is no need for it to be used unless desired.  The R
for adding these custom attributes is also quite straight forward:
attr(z, "name") <- "temperature"
sets the name attribute of object, z, to "temperature.  that's it!