[kepler-dev] Ptolemy II UI

[xiaowen]

Hi Edward,

Thanks for the response.

I've attached a workflow that shows this problem in Ptolemy II 4.0.

To create this workflow, I basically took a valid workflow and manually 
edited it to change the _location property from something like [85.0, 
45.0] to (85.0, 45.0).  Since the MoML parser doesn't recognize the 
usage of the parenthesis, it gives many errors.  The error dialogs don't 
have the 'Skip remaining errors' button, so there's no way that I could 
see to stop the series of error dialogs.

This example is slightly contrived since users don't normally edit 
workflows manually.  While we were using the graphical tool to create a 
simple workflow, there was an instance where something similar 
(unstoppable series of error dialogs) happened, but I don't remember the 
exact circumstances.  It might have occurred during type resolution. 
I'll let you know I encounter this issue again in a different context.

Thanks!
Xiaowen



Edward A Lee wrote:

> 
> Xiaowen:
> 
> Thanks for pointing these out...
> 
> These are clearly bugs in Ptolemy II, so I don't think it makes
> sense to fix them in Kepler independently...  We'll get them fixed
> in Ptolemy II.
> 
> Can you send me a concrete model illustrating the second one?
> 
> The 4.0 release is out, so this will have to be provided as a patch
> or in a 4.1 release.
> 
> Edward
> 
> 
> At 11:25 AM 6/29/2004 -0700, xiaowen wrote:
> 
>> Hi All,
>>
>> After meeting with customers for SPA and watching them play with 
>> Ptolemy II, we noticed a couple of small annoyances with the Ptolemy 
>> II UI.
>>
>> 1. If you right-click on an actor and select "Configure Ports", make 
>> some changes to the ports, then close the window without clicking 
>> "Apply" or "Commit" first, Ptolemy II will happily close the window 
>> and discard all changes.  This happened many times during our session 
>> where we clicked the little 'X' in the corner to close the window, and 
>> had to redo all our port configuration.  It would be nicer if a window 
>> popped up warning users that changes will be discarded, and giving 
>> them the opportunity at that time to save the changes.
>>
>> 2. The "Skip remaining errors" button doesn't seem to always appear 
>> and doesn't skip all remaining errors.  As an example of this, take a 
>> model created in Ptolemy II 4.0-beta and open it in Ptolemy II 3.0.2.  
>> The first error dialog gives me the "Skip remaining errors" button, 
>> but when I click it, I'm still confronted with a series of error 
>> dialogs, where I'm forced to continue clicking "Skip element" many 
>> times before the model gets displayed.  It would be nice if there were 
>> a button to click that would skip errors of all kinds and just go 
>> ahead and display the model to the best of its ability.
>>
>>
>> Do you all think it would be worthwhile to make these changes to 
>> Ptolemy II or Kepler?
>>
>> I don't how hard it would be to implement them.  I'm guessing that the 
>> first change would require modifying 
>> ptolemy/actor/gui/PortConfigurerDialog.java to change the behavior 
>> upon closing the dialog.
>>
>> I'm not sure how close Ptolemy II is now to its final 4.0 release, but 
>> if it's still accepting small UI fixes, these might be good candidates =)
>>
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Xiaowen
>> _______________________________________________
>> kepler-dev mailing list
>> kepler-dev at ecoinformatics.org
>> http://www.ecoinformatics.org/mailman/listinfo/kepler-dev
> 
> 
> ------------
> Edward A. Lee, Professor
> 518 Cory Hall, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720
> phone: 510-642-0455, fax: 510-642-2739
> eal at eecs.Berkeley.EDU, http://ptolemy.eecs.berkeley.edu/~eal
> 
> _______________________________________________
> kepler-dev mailing list
> kepler-dev at ecoinformatics.org
> http://www.ecoinformatics.org/mailman/listinfo/kepler-dev

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