|
DiFX GUI
|
|
DiFX GUI
|
Description of the widgets specifically created for the DiFX GUI
The DiFX GUI uses a number of purpose-built widgets to accomplish things that the Java Swing toolkit (which was inadvisedly chosen as the base for the GUI) did not include. These widgets are used throughout the GUI. While they were developed with the idea that their operation would be intuitive, this may not always be the case. For this reason they are described in some detail here.
Several of the windows that make up the GUI (most notably the Experiment Editor and Job Control Window, but there are others) are organized in a browser form, with a small number of "top level" panels that can be opened or closed based on whether you are interested in them or not (some of these panels also contain their own, similar browser structures). To open or close a panel, click on the "title" bar at the top of the panel. If you open many panels you can often expand in size beyond the window limits, in which case the scroll bar on the right may be used to navigate up and down (the mouse wheel tries to do the same thing, as well as dragging the screen up and down with the mouse, although sometimes the panels trap these events for other purposes - the scroll bar will always work). Arrows, as well as panel appearance will let you know whether they are "open" or "closed". Mixed in with the opening/closing panels are "permanent" panels that cannot be closed. Permanent panels do not have an obvious title bar and have no arrow icon. The example below (part of the Experiment Editor) shows open, closed, and permanent panels. The open panel "Sources" contains a series of closed panels. The bottom-most panel is "permanent".
The DiFX GUI has a number of "Text Field" widgets that allow the user to enter text (file paths, string settings, etc.). Except in a few cases, the settings you enter do not take effect until you hit the "enter" key. To indicate that a setting has been "changed" but not "committed" by hitting the enter key, the text fields will turn yellow once the text inside them is changed in any way. Hitting enter will both cause their content to be used and the yellow color to disappear.
In locations where text fields are specifying paths on the DiFX host, tab completion is implemented. Hitting the "tab" key will cause a remote "ls" operation on the DiFX host, the results of which will be used to extend the text field content as much as possible. This should act exactly like familiar tab completion except there may be a perceptible delay involved if the connection to the DiFX host through guiServer is slow. Tab completion does not work if you are not connected to the DiFX host through guiServer.
Number boxes are Text Field widgets that are restricted to numbers. Their values can be changed either by typing (only numeric values are accepted), or by spinning the mouse over them. They can contain floating point or integer-only values
Tooltips are pop-up informational windows that appear when hovering over GUI widgets. Standard Java tooltips are restricted to single lines of text that have no formatting capacity, limiting the information that they can convey. The DiFX GUI has its own "Complex" tooltips that include multiple lines of text, different fonts, colors, and links to GUI documentation (they also have a better default background color). While it could be argued that they occasionally try to do too much, we feel they are more useful.
All Java-style tooltips throughout the GUI are gradually being replaced with Complex Tooltips. This is an on-going process.
The DiFX GUI provides a number of "message" windows that contain notifications from the GUI itself or from DiFX processes. Messages come in the typical three flavors:
1.8.6 
