Pie Chart Enhancements / April 2014 / RiverWare 6.5
Phil Weinstein, CADSWES, 4-27-2014 (a)

Developed Feature Summary

1. Timestep Animation / Slide-Show Support
2. New Display Options
3. Other Display Changes
4. Dialog Management and Geometry Improvements
5. Fixes
6. Reusable Software Components and other Software Enhancements
7. Previously developed Pie Chart Enhancements for RiverWare 6.5

(1) Timestep Animation / Slide-Show Support:

• A horizontal slider, synchronized with the pie chart's date/time spinner, controls and graphically indicates the current timestep within the series data's time range.
• A play/pause button starts or stops a forward animation at one of six animation speeds ranging from 0.1 seconds to 3 seconds per timestep frame.
• Forward and backward stepping are provided by the date/time spinner's step buttons.

(2) New Display Options:

• Background Color for Display (on-screen)
• Background Color for Image Export and Print
• Bolded Labels (for date label, slice labels and optional summary data).

(3) Other Display Changes:

• Numbers are conditionally shown with comma seperators (depending on RiverWare's global "Show Commas in Numbers" setting).
• Radial scale circles (25%, 50%, 75%) are now dashed -- not solid lines.
• Optional summary statistics are now horizontally centered, rather than being in the bottom left corner.

(4) Dialog Management and Geometry Improvements:

• Only one pie chart dialog is shown for any particular pie chart (output device) instance. Clicking "Generate" or "Apply" from the output manager or a pie chart configuration dialog just updates the corresponding pie chart dialog -- instead of showing a redundant one.
• The pie chart dialog's visibility (e.g. "minimized" state) is now independent from the output manager and pie chart configuration dialogs.
• The pie chart's auto-sizing and centering has been improved. Better image "stability" was needed especially for the new animation feature.

(5) Fixes:

• Two crashes involving the configuration and pie chart dialogs were addressed. See Gnats 5483.

(6) Reusable Software Components and other Software Enhancements:

• The timestep slider control, with animation generator, is a new component which can be attached to any RiverWare date/time spinner. [DateTimeSpinSlider / hpp cpp].
• Working example, in RiverWare, of a popup slider widget (inside a QFrame widget; used here to control the animation speed). [See animated GIF].
• Technical: The Output Device class hierarchy now supports generation of DEVICE_DELETED callbacks from the most-derived class (from the destructor). In this way, all instance data is intact when client modules receive that callback. To date, this been applied only to the ChartDevice subclass.

(7) Previously developed Pie Chart Enhancements for RiverWare 6.5

• [Nov 2013]: Support for pie charts in RiverWare model reports. See Model Report Item Enhancements.
• [Mar 2014]: The configuration dialog's slot list now supports copy/paste (context menu operations) of slot references to/from the slot clipboard; and slot name text to the system clipboard.