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MultiText transparency + animations in Graphiti [message #1694603]

Wed, 06 May 2015 11:14

Eclipse User

Dear Michael,

I am currently trying to add animations to Graphiti and I am struggling with modifying the transparency of a GFTextFlow, the internal Figure associated with a MultiText.

Actually it looks like all GF* inheriting from Figure do not have the same internal design, especially regarding the transparency and GraphicsAlgorithm management. For example GFText internally stores a Text and calls the method Graphics#setAlpha() with the transparency given by the Text GA. It also provides a convenient method "getGraphicsAlgorithm()" which returns this internal Text shape. On the other hand GFTextFlow (its sibling for MultiText shapes) also stores a MultiText but does not call the method Graphics#setAlpha() and neither provides a method to get the stored MultiText.

Indeed when anyone wants to play with the draw2d shapes, we got quite early blocked because of these inconsistencies...
What I would suggest is:

To have a unified way to get back to GraphicsAlgorithm(s) from GFShapes by adding an API interface providing at least a method "getGraphicsAlgorithm" for all GF elements which directly represent a GraphicsAlgorithm.
To have an abstract class implementing the previous interface and setting common values coming from GraphicsAlgorithm(s). All "final" GFShapes should extend this class.
To add transparency support for GFTextFlow -> MultiText shapes

I would like to know your opinion on these proposals.

By the way I have found a way to "animate" a bit Graphiti shapes programmatically. The main point to have an "animation thing" is to spawn a background Thread which plays "frames" corresponding to the decomposition of the move from the start point to the end point and sleeps for a given amount of time between two frames.
It works quite well for translations and resize and except from the MultiText thing it works well for transparency modification. I am working on a kind of library supporting these animations, when it will be finished I can post my code here if anyone is interested.

Best regards,
Jérôme

Re: MultiText transparency + animations in Graphiti [message #1694810 is a reply to message #1694603]

Fri, 08 May 2015 03:18

Eclipse User

Jérôme,

thanks for that proposal, actually I also found several inconsistencies
between Text and MultiText shapes. And it is also true that for other shapes
some cleanup would be needed as well.

So, your proposals sound good to me and I think we should go for something
like that. The only thing I'm not sure about is the introduction of the
abstract base class all shapes can implement, that will be in conflict with
the current class hierarchy. It might be we have to use delegation here.

So, would you file an enhancement bug to track work on this? Not sure if we
can get this into the current release (Eclipse Mars in June) still, as we
are already quite far in the cycle, the milestone will be the first release
candidate...

Regarding anination: that sounds cool, looking forward to that. :-)

Michael

Re: MultiText transparency + animations in Graphiti [message #1694984 is a reply to message #1694810]

Mon, 11 May 2015 04:24

Eclipse User

Michael,

I am glad you agree with this enhancement proposal ! Here is the bugzilla part: https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=466961

I will keep you in touch regarding animations, I still have several improvements to make to avoid the creation of one Thread per shape which would be really costly Smile

.

Regards,
Jérôme.

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