FWD » Core Development » User Interface

The Widget browser should provide runtime insight into the widget hierarchy. The idea is to have some basic functionality quick: a Swing tree view showing widget tree structure, widget types, at least basic attributes and hopefully some bounds visualization in the live window.

See the email conversation below for more details.

On 5.10.2014 14:27, Greg Shah wrote:

Hynek,

I do think this will be enhanced over time. I can imagine this also providing views into:

- the event queue
- showing a trace of the event processing
- z-order
- layout/clipping rectangles (visually showing the outlines of the associated rectangles)
- showing a trace of the drawing

Use of reflection may allow all data from both the contained config instance and the widget itself to be displayed.

For now, do whatever you can do in 2 days. We can always enhance it later. I'd like this to work for both ChUI and GUI if possible. It is OK to add features to the driver interfaces if that is necessary.

Thanks,
Greg

On 10/04/2014 05:52 PM, Hynek Cihlar wrote:

Hi Greg,

I have an idea on my mind I want to share with you.

I already spent some time on modifying the widget layouts and from this short experience I think that some kind of widget browser would be useful. Having the widget tree structure, widget attributes and maybe the position in the parent container visualised during runtime would decrease the time spent in debugger.

It could be a very simple Swing component activated with a Java property. A tree view with the widget structure, some useful attributes shown for the selected item with the widget bounds highlighted. A matter of cca two days to pull together.

Thanks,
Hynek

The task is nearly finished. I am attaching a screenshot of the browser in action.

I got a little stuck with the highlighting part. The drawing of the highlighted area itself is not a problem but I need to figure out how to invalidate the widgets (to trigger redraw to switch the highlight off) out of the regular event loop in ThinClient. The widget gets highlighted when a widget node is selected in the widget browser and this happens independently on the standard event processing. Anyway, I will investigate further.

Attached is the finished implementation. Supported are both GUI and ChUI while highlighting was implemented only for GUI.

Note that the highlight feature works based on the physical location and dimensions reported by the widgets and thus may be inaccurate with the actual screen buffer. I noticed that some widgets do report wrong coordinates.

Please review.

Good idea with the ant script. I believe I resolved all the comments. In regards to AspectJ I think we share the same view. The reasons I used the aspect for launching Widget Browser were (1) the possibility for conditional compilation, (2) make it least dependent on the actual state of widget source codes (for example if somebody forgets to call base.draw(), Widget Browser will still work).

Please review.

• adds the object identity property,
• fixes widget highlight - the coordinates are now relative to the screen,
• changes the highlight color to red - the previous cyan was too close to the default widget color scheme,
• fixes an NPE.

Please review.

Also I found another little issue. Sometimes the highlight doesn't have any effect or draws to a different window. The reason for this is the GuiDriver.selectWindow feature. When the highlight command is sent to the driver it may have selected a different simulator than the one belonging to the window originally used to resolve the output manager. I haven't figured out how to (at least temporarily) select the correct simulator while not interfere with the widget drawing itself. The usability workaround is to move the window or perform any user action that will trigger the selection of the proper simulator.

The attached file was committed to bzr revision 10671.

It contains the following changes to Widget browser.

- Widget config fields are displayed in the widget property table.
- Fixed cast exceptions when the progress program contained an alert box (or other klind of client window widgets not inheritied from the type Window).
- Other bug fixes.

• property table now contains all widget and its associated config fields,
• property name filter,
• if property value is a weak reference it is dereferenced.
• property value string formatter recognizes more well-known types.

Please review.

The attached update extends Widget browser with the possibility to copy widget properties to clipboard. This is useful for example when comparing widget object trees or for full-text searching.

Please review.

Missing history entry added and converted tabs to spaces in the whole PropertyTable.java. build.xml removed as this should not be part of the changes to commit.

Please review.