Hello world,
Part of separating the UI from the Core of Trace Compass is to remove all instances of ITmfTrace from all viewers.
This entails several potential modifications.
## How is ITmfTrace used in UI?
The trace is mostly used as a key in the viewer. It is mostly used in "trace opened" to check if the viewer already has the trace opened? There are places where the trace is needed though, it appears to be used for:
- Get next event (control flow view) (should be fixed with data provider)
- Get trace names in timegraph (Gantt) views and XY plot views? (should also be fixed with data providers)
- Make sure nothing breaks. :)
## What are the first steps to decoupling this?
I would suggest the following steps:
1. Deprecate getActiveTrace and getActiveContext. This is optional but super recommended
2. Overhaul TmfTraceManager to handle UUIDs instead of ITmfTrace as a key
3. Overhaul TmfTraceUtils to handle UUIDs instead of ITmfTrace as a key
4. Add shims in DataProviderManager to handle UUIDs instead of ITmfTrace as a key
5. Create a temporary DataproviderManager shim so all views go though one.
6. Change symbol provider to handle UUIDs instead of ITmfTrace as the key.
7. Update project explorer model to require UUIDs rather than ITmfTrace. Tricker but actually quite isolated.
8. Make traces register automatically in the TmfTraceManager
9. Maybe add the trace name to the trace context if need be
## What about the API?
Old API will be deprecated, but available for a year.
## When should these changes be done?
We are aiming for this to be done for Trace Compass 4.0
## How much work will it be?
Short answer: Lots.
More details:
There will probably be over a dozen patches + incubator patches on Gerrit that will touch over 50 classes. To give an idea, ITmfTrace is referenced over 1900 times in trace compass with the incubator.
The goal is to decouple every package ending in ui from ITmfTrace, not just tmf.ui. One of the bigger violators is analysis.ui, luckily it uses the trace in the same way in many classes.
## I need help updating my plug-in to work with the new way of working?
Email us, or open a bug, we like helping
PS. this is a draft, feel free to poke holes in it, there are surely some use cases that are missed.
