Phil Weinstein / Accomplishments -- February 2011

General Development Accomplishments

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[I.A.1] Sponsored Projects / RiverWare / New Development
   Slot Description Enhancements
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These slot description support enhancements have been applied to RiverWare 6.1 Development:
  1. Descriptions are supported on all slots. They are no longer limited to slots on Data Objects.
  2. The description panel used in Open Slot Dialogs and Open Object Dialogs has been simplified. It is no longer necessary to click an "Edit" button to modify the description.
  3. New slot description search function: The old "Find Series Slots with Inputs" dialog has been extended to support also searching for, and enumerating slots having any description, or a description containing specific text. Within the displayed slot list, a column showing the first 150 characters of each slot's description can optionally be displayed -- and this is available also in the "Find Series Slots with Inputs" use of this search dialog. This new search feature effectively adds the ability to "bookmark" arbitrary sets of slots within a RiverWare model.
  4. Slot selections can be limited by slot description (in the general Slot Selector) -- either to slots having any description, or to slots having a description containing specified text. This applies also to persistent slot selections, for example, the slot selections used to define Link Display Groups.

Description text matching, in both the slot description search feature and the slot selector "description filter" is case insensitive.

These enhancements are described and illustrated on webpages linked from this URL:

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[I.A.2] Sponsored Projects / RiverWare / Bug Analyses and Fixes
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[I.A.3] Sponsored Projects / RiverWare / Proposals and Estimate for New RiverWare Work
   Analysis: Supporting User-Descriptions on Non-Data Objects and Slots
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An analysis of extending support for user-supplied descriptions on data objects and data object slots to all simulation objects and all slots was done. This analysis is available at this URL:

See also the description of some of the development done in February 2011 on more general support for user-supplied descriptions on slots. Additional analysis and development work continued in March.

Maintenance Accomplishments

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[I.A.4] Sponsored Projects / RiverWare / Software Maintenance
  -- Qt3 to Qt4 Port: RiverWare QtDmi Library
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All "Phase 1 and Phase 2" porting of the Qt3 C++ modules in the QtDmi library was completed in February. The involves conversion of all Qt3 "UI" files (widget layout definitions) and the uses of all Qt3 classes to Qt4 classes. (The final uncompleted Phase 3 involves recoding of all uses of Qt3-compatibility methods in Qt4 classes). Work this month consisted mostly of porting these dialogs:

The most challenging part of this port involved the various List and TreeView widgets, many of which supported special incell editing of various types. With this work, we were able to remove a somewhat complex set of our own C++ classes to support incell editing within Qt3 List and TreeView widgets. An overview of our ongoing Qt3 to Qt4 port is available at this URL: http://cadswes2.colorado.edu/~philw/2011/Qt4Port/JanAnalysis/

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[I.A.4] Sponsored Projects / RiverWare / Software Maintenance
  -- Workspace and Locator Fixes and Enhancements
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The following fixes and usability enhancements were applied to RiverWare 6.1 development. In early March, most of these were applied also to RiverWare 6.0 (for the 6.0.4 patch release).

  1. The autoscaling of both the Locator View and the In-View Locator Mode now includes the rectangle representing the actual view's current visible area -- that is, in addition to the area covering all existing SimObj icons. This implements a solution to the "Lost Location" scenario. See: https://cadswes2.colorado.edu/~philw/2011/Locator/LostLocation.html
  2. After loading a model or switching views, if no object is visible within the view, the view is scrolled to the most central object. That's defined as the object closest to the "average" object location within the view.
  3. Simplification: Only either the Locator View dialog or the "In-View" Locator Mode is active at any one time. Initiating either while the other is active closes the other. This simplified some locator-view/workspace interactions which do have some minor improvements, e.g. updating the locator view scale in response to certain operations within the workspace view.
  4. Added zoom factor between 1 and 2: 1.4 (close to the square root of 2).
  5. Model-based persistence of the width of the Workspace's Simulation Object List. (This was not also applied to the "6.0.4" patch release).

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