Object and Slot Viewer Revisions for RiverWare 7.2 / Nov 2017
 Phil. 11-21-2017. Dev Updates: 12-05-2017

Ref: White-board notes (Image), 11-21-2017, David, Mitch, Edie and Phil.

Overview

With some experience using the new Object Viewer (7.1) and Slot Viewer (7.2 development), we're deciding on several usability enhancements.

The one architectural change is that the Object Viewer's content (set of simulation objects) will be persistent, at least within the RiverWare session. The Object Viewer will be independently showable (i.e. not just as a result of "opening" a simulation object), and when shown, it will contain the simulation objects which it had the last time it was visible. A few new operations will be added to manage the set of objects in the Object Viewer.

Enhancements for the RiverWare 7.2 release will include:

  1. Workspace:
    1. Add "Object Viewer" button in the bottom left corner, to the left of the Workspace dynamic status text.
       
  2. Slot Viewer:
    1. Select Display Columns (Series Slot) when adding Series Slots to Slot Viewer. This will occur also when attempting to add a slot to the slot viewer which is already shown in the slot viewer -- the existing display column for that slot will become selected.
       
    2. New Operation: Close Selected Slots, both in the File menu and column header context menu.
       
    3. Additional SCT operations. Already provided under the file menu are "Show All Slots in New SCT..." and "Add All Slots to Open SCT...". To this we will add analogous operations for the Selected Slots.
       
    4. Certain series slot types should initially open in their own slot dialog, rather than as columns in the Slot Viewer. This is distinct from the question of which slots can be shown in the Slot Viewer. At least the following types will initially be shown in their own dialog:
      1. MultiSlots with two or more subslots
      2. RPL Expression Slots
         
  3. Object Viewer:
    1. The Object Viewer's set of Object Tabs will persist when closing and reopening that dialog.
    2. When closing an Object -- i.e. closing an Object Tab in the Object Viewer, or closing an Open Object dialog -- the user will be presented with a confirmation dialog, "Close Object's Slot Dialogs?" (Yes/No), with a checkbox option, "Don't ask again in this RiverWare session".
    3. Menu operation to "Close all objects".

Development -- 11-22-2017

(A) Indicated Slots added to Slot Viewer by selecting those Slots (display columns). [Item 2.1]

The desirable behavior had been coded, but the effect of selecting the slots being added was being wiped out by subsequent selection operations. The desirable behavior was restored by eliminating these subsequent selection operations, including some that were redundantly setting the QTableView's "current cell".

Note: If slots being added to the Slot Viewer are already shown in that dialog, those slots remain in their display column, but the dialog is scrolled to those slots, and those slots become selected.

(B) Fixes to Selection Statistics

(B1) Slot Count defect. The number of slots represented in the slot/timestep cell selection was not being computed properly. One consequence of this was that when cells from two slots were selected, the name of the FIRST slot was presented INSTEAD OF showing the NUMBER OF selected slots, as intended.

(B2) Update when navigating with arrow keys. When pressing any of the arrow keys, the adjacent cell (adjacent to the single "current" cell) becomes selected. However, when doing so, the selection statistics lines became blank. This is now appropriately updated with the current cell's value. This has more meaning than it had, with the recent introduction of the Time-Integrated Sum for rate unit type values (e.g. Flow or Power).

Developement -- 12-05-2017 (#1) and (#3):

The two main enhancements are basically:

  1. The Object Viewer can be closed, and reopened without loss its list of Object Tabs.  A new "Object Viewer" button now appears on the Workspace's status line to reopen the viewer.
  2. Since the recent separation of the "life cycle" of Object and Slot dialogs (in RiverWare 7.2 development), we now provide an explicit option to close the Slot Dialogs (or slot columns in the new Slot Viewer) when the user closes an Object (or object tab in the Slot Viewer).

SEE THIS DOCUMENT:

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