[Cs-studio-core] CSS BOY ideas

[<tom...@di...>]

Hi Xihui,

Kay came to Diamond last week to give us some training on CSS, and now I have some ideas about BOY to run past you. We're looking to completely replace EDM with BOY on beamlines, so I imagine we'll be extending the EDM to BOY converter, but I wanted to take this opportunity to redesign some of our screens instead of just converting them as they are.

* I like the way you've used the Properties pane in the OPI editor so that you can select elements and change their properties, and I'd like to do the same for certain widgets at runtime. I thought maybe make the group box selectable, so that when it is clicked on it loads an XML tree Name,PV,WidgetType,Tooltip elements that are displayed in the properties panel. This would mean that many of our settings screens (consisting of labels and text edits / displays) wouldn't have to be ported and could be autogenerated from tags in the database. What do you think?

* I'd like to make a hybrid between the alarm area panel and a BOY screen. I'd like to define my alarm areas in terms of beamline components (slits1, DCM, mirror1), and create a "launcher" BOY screen with an icon for each component that launches a related display, but is still connected to the alarm status for that area. Would it be better to create an "Alarm area" widget in BOY, or extend the alarm area panel?

* I'd like to make a screen which allows you to rewire areaDetector plugins on the fly. We already have a GEF based tool in our data acquisition package that does something similar: http://www.dawnsci.org/tools/workflows but I wondered if anyone had done something like this already. If I've already made the properties widget I mentioned above, then clicking on one of the plugins could bring up its properties view to make changes to it. Has anyone done something similar in CSS?
 
* Our GDA team use the windowbuilder pro tool for creating their GUIs: https://developers.google.com/java-dev-tools/wbpro/userinterface . They also seem to take a different approach to draw2d and SWT. Instead of creating lots of draw2d and SWT widgets, and placing them on one big draw2d canvas, they create mostly SWT composites, with a few draw2d widgets on their own canvases, and use windowbuilder pro to lay them out using SWT layouts. Is this an approach that you've considered?

I'm aware this is probably a significant amount of work, and we will have effort available for this, but I wanted to get an idea of how much work it would be, and avoid doing something that someone else has already started!

Thanks,
Tom Cobb
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+44 (0)1235 778582



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