Re: [udig-devel] MapEditor GEF palette - some thoughts

[Jody Garnett <jody.garnett@xxxxxxxxx>]

It is out of scope for me but I would be glad to help with the design / review.

Here are my thoughts thus far:

I was thinking that this could mostly be done when the global ApplicationGIS.getToolManager() method delegates to the tool manager provided by the current MapPart. This would allow a View or Editor to control what it advertises.

Why is this needed? Right now the GEF Palette data structures are managed from ToolManager; if need to break that functionality out we would need a second implementation and the ability to allow ApplicationGIS to switch between them.

With respect to just reusing Palette with a View:

- the ToolManager already owns the MapEditDomain (used for the ToolPalette) so there is no need to grab code out of MapEditorWithPalette

- a PaletteViewer is already available from GEF  (if you wanted to place a palette beside your view) and you can grab the MapEditDomain from the ToolManager.

I cannot remember if view can be marked as a palette provider; and thus wired up to the global Palette View (or if that interface is just available to editors?).

I would also like to follow up on seeing if we can "disable" palette entries; I think our tools are already good at "not functioning" when they are disabled. We may be able to change their icon to a grayed out icon when they are disabled.

-- 

Jody Garnett

On Monday, 5 September 2011 at 5:11 PM, Jesse Eichar wrote:

I think frank has good points here.  I think the solution is to do some refactoring.  The views could use some of the inner classes of MapEditor as well so they can have the projection widget and so on.  

Jesse

On Sat, Sep 3, 2011 at 2:51 AM, Jody Garnett <jody.garnett@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

From my point of view as an integrator, who uses uDig within a already running RCP application its a bit more complicated to be excited. Mostly the interaction model for editors and views should be the same all over an application. IMHO it was pretty easy to run uDig in a host RCP application and have the same look and feel for all application editors (all Actions were contributed on startup and enabled/disabled because of the context, e.g. selection available, geometry type of layer resource for edit-actions, etc) . 

The new GEF palette would be great in uDig as a standalone application, integrated in an other RCP apllication its kind of "misfit". I guess some projects that have uDig already integrated would not update to the new version, if the new palette style would be the only available MapEditor, because of mixed styled applications for end users.

Up to 1.2.2 it was possible to run MapEditor without having dependencies to GEF (printing module was never integrated). Right now GEF is required for the core project.ui bundle which leads into a bigger footprint.

IMHO it would be fantastic to have additional bundle(s) for the MapEditor(s) based on an AbstractMapEditor, one which extends GraphicalEditorWithFlyoutPalette and an other one (old classic style) that extends EditorPart. So the host application could decide which editor (extension point) to use.

Please speak up next week on this one; Jesse asked us to combine the two classes we have there now. If we want to keep the MapEditor we will need more of a plan:

a) to prevent code duplication (perhaps we can make a super class?)

b) allow applications to control which one the use (there is already some control to allow you to supply a custom ToolManger - perhaps that could help?)

But I will be a bit sad if we have to keep both as half of the point on this one was to minimise the amount of code we have to maintain so we could improve ToolManager over time. While I am more comfortable with ToolManager now - less code would be more easy to follow.

The other thing that would really help Frank is this -- I cannot see what you are seeing as I do not have a good test RCP application to show me the problem you describe.

Most of the sample application we have in the tutorials folder make use of a View (containing a MapViewer). I suppose the "Hello World" custom application can be a good example of what you mean? Not really as it is mostly a cut down version of uDig.

Can you think of a good example application we could make that shows the problem; that we could keep in the tutorial folder (just so we can have a good conversation and have a reference point for this kind of use of the SDK in the future).

Jody

_______________________________________________
User-friendly Desktop Internet GIS (uDig)
http://udig.refractions.net
http://lists.refractions.net/mailman/listinfo/udig-devel

_______________________________________________
User-friendly Desktop Internet GIS (uDig)
http://udig.refractions.net
http://lists.refractions.net/mailman/listinfo/udig-devel