[kepler-dev] Hiding port names

[Bertram Ludaescher]

Edward:

Thanks for your suggestions. I agree that it would be very useful for
the Kepler branch to be able to benefit from new features/fixes in the 
Ptolemy branch.

As for the specific port name display feature: We had recently
discussed this here. I had suggested it would be nice to have in
Kepler a switch, accessible from the GUI, that let's you globally turn
on or off port names (specific "nasty" ;-) actors might still decide
to ignore such a global display change. In many of the current Kepler
workflows, it makes sense to have the port name display "on" by
default.

I see some other desirable (and switchable) display feature coming
down the pike: as part of Kepler/SEEK we're working on what we call
"semantic types" of ports (aside: maybe we can borrow some pieces from 
the recently added static unit type system; but ours is still quite
different). Once we have those, the semantic type, the "regular"
Ptolemy type, and the port name all would be useful information to see 
(or suppress) in the GUI. 

Another nice feature would be a possible color-coding and annotation
of the arcs (links) between actors. For example, Tobin recently used a 
30-way (or so) "bus" between two actors. That's an interesting
property of the arc for display. Similary, the arc color might
indicate some sort of "liveness", or the type of data flowing (or that 
may be an arc label) etc.

Yet another feature, esp. for long running workflows, is the good old
"traffic light idea": e.g., in PN, depending on when the process has
last been known to be "alive", an "LED" of the actor would indicate
how alive the actor is. Possible the current code that draws a red
outline around the actor might also be used: In PN, a red, yellow, or
green outline may indicate the degree of liveness, throughput or
something of the sort (currently red means active, maybe in this
traffic-light setting green would be active, yellow would be
"congested", and red would be (possibly) dead .... well, this requires 
some more thinking..;-)

As for the ant error: I think several Kepler folks have worked on
the recent merge back of Kepler with PT 4.0 and would be able to help.

Bertram


>>>>> "EAL" == Edward A Lee <eal at eecs.berkeley.edu> writes:
EAL> 
EAL> At 04:02 PM 7/21/2004 -0700, Efrat Jaeger wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> I'm using the _showName attribute to reveal port names in the 
>> constructors. These definitions cannot be disabled as they are part of the 
>> class definition. Is there a way to set the _showName attribute as a 
>> default value but still be able to disable it?
>> 
>> Thanks,
>> Efrat
EAL> 
EAL> (Note: I've changed the cc from ptolemy-hackers to ptresearch,
EAL> since this isn't relevant to any current release).
EAL> 
EAL> I'm checking into the cvs tree a fix that changes the way
EAL> several marker attributes have been used.  These are:
EAL> 
EAL>    _showName
EAL>    _hideName
EAL>    _hide
EAL>    _centerName
EAL> 
EAL> Previously, these attributes have their effect by either being
EAL> present or absent.  Unfortunately, this mechanism is no longer
EAL> very useful now that we have actor-oriented classes.
EAL> 
EAL> I've changed the mechanism so that these are now boolean-valued
EAL> parameters so that they can be set or unset irrespective of
EAL> whether they are defined in a class.
EAL> 
EAL> We really need to set things up so that kepler folks are routinely
EAL> building against a cvs snapshot of Ptolemy II, so that changes
EAL> like this can be taken advantage of without waiting for a release...
EAL> 
EAL> I tried putting kepler and our Ptolemy II cvs tree side by side
EAL> and setting KEPLER and PTII appropriately, and using ant to build,
EAL> but "ant run" doesn't work for me... I get:
EAL> 
EAL> java.lang.Exception: Failed to read configuration 
EAL> 'jar:file:/C:/ptII/lib/kepler-configs.jar!/ptolemy/configs/kepler/configuration.xml'
EAL> 
EAL>          at 
EAL> ptolemy.vergil.VergilApplication._createDefaultConfiguration(VergilApplication.java:278)
EAL> 
EAL>          ....
EAL>    java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: ptolemy/data/type/BaseType (wrong name: 
EAL> src/exp/ptolemy/data/type/BaseType) in 
EAL> jar:file:/C:/ptII/lib/kepler-configs.jar!/ptolemy/configs/kepler/configuration.xml 
EAL> at line 9 and column 62
EAL> Caused by:
EAL>   java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: ptolemy/data/type/BaseType (wrong name: 
EAL> src/exp/ptolemy/data/type/BaseType)
EAL> 
EAL>          at ptolemy.moml.MoMLParser.startElement(MoMLParser.java:2778)
EAL> 
EAL>          at com.microstar.xml.XmlParser.parseElement(XmlParser.java:952)
EAL> 
EAL> ...
EAL> 
EAL> 
EAL> Any ideas?
EAL> 
EAL> 
EAL> Edward
EAL> 
EAL> 
EAL> 
EAL> ------------
EAL> Edward A. Lee, Professor
EAL> 518 Cory Hall, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720
EAL> phone: 510-642-0455, fax: 510-642-2739
EAL> eal at eecs.Berkeley.EDU, http://ptolemy.eecs.berkeley.edu/~eal
EAL> 
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