[gme-users] Controlling the order in which children are returned, decorators

[Krishnakumar B]

Hi,

I would like to know if there is a way in GME to control the order in which
children of a Model are returned. Specifically, I have a Model which
represents a IDL interface's method. I would like to preserve the order in
which the children of this model, i.e., the parameters of the method, are
stored and retrieved. I need this so that the parameters in the generated
IDL always appear in the same order. Is this possible?

Assume that the above is not possible, and I add an attribute to every
child that governs the order of the children. Is there a way that I can
automatically assign a value to this attribute everytime a child is created
in the model? I would like to keep track of the count and
increment/decrement the count on child creation/deletion. Is this achieved
with a decorator?

One more decorator related question. I would like to add support for
hierarchical views in my models. By hierarchical, I mean that I want a
Model's view to show the contents of the Model i.e, it's children and the
connections between these children. Note that I don't want the children to
appear as ports. I want the same view that GME will display when I
double-click the Model's icon and open it, shown as a snapshot when viewed
one level up in the hierarchy i.e, a miniature snapshot of the contents. Is
there some guide/manual that will help me acheive this? This is a very
critical feature that seems to be missing from our tool and there is a
*lot* of interest in providing this capability.

Essentially we have a Component Assembly (a Model) which shows the
components in the assembly and the connections between them. But currently
there is no support for composition, i.e, one cannot create an assembly of
Component assemblies. But experience with using the tool to make models
which have many instances of the same grouping of components i.e, an
assembly, shows that the current view where one has to scroll the sheet to
view the bigger assembly is not very intuitive. Hence my queries.

Any suggestions/pointers/ideas are very welcome.

Thanks,
kitty.