FW: New Feature for GME

[Peter Volgyesi]

----------
From: 	Peter Volgyesi[SMTP:XVOLGY at ISIS-SERVER.ISIS.VANDERBILT.EDU]
Sent: 	Wednesday, November 20, 2002 3:03:46 AM
To: 	GME Group
Subject: 	Re: FW: New Feature for GME
Auto forwarded by a Rule

Hi

> Can we have a decorator or built into GME a way to visualize the
> internals of a model?
> To explain:
> 
> We have a model say A, containing another model B. If B contains atoms
> and/or models then when I am seeing A in full screen then I want to be
> able to see within B its models and or atoms ( a miniature version of
> what I would have seen if I double clicked on it).
 >
 >
>
> The way I envision this is to allow the user to set the size of any
> model and then to provide the option to make the model opaque or
> transparent. If transparent then its internals should be seen
> 
> Peter, do you think it is possible and if so how much work would it
> require.
 >
 > Then later we could allow clicks on the models and use this stuff to
 > connect objects at any depth apart and these kind of cool stuff.



In general, it is possible. And it is not so difficult. However, there 
are some problems, limitations:

- you can easily visualize the contained "boxes", but you will have 
problems with the connections (you should implement a mini autorouter, 
if you want to visualize the connections as they look like in a normal view)
- even if you visualize the deeper levels of your model, you cannot 
provide ports from these levels. (This is an MGA/META constraint, and it 
  protects you from creating big mess in your model.)
- right now, GME does not support model resizing

Despite the problems above, one should implement such a decorator, 
because the need for it is coming up again and again. We have 
opened/created the decorator interface to enable you to contribute to 
the GUI. I think, a good starting point can be the source of the default 
decorator (ask Akos for the source), however you won't be able to use it 
as is, because it depends on some other parts of the GME source tree.


--
peter