Bug #2123
open
need a way to uniquely identify actor in a workflow and locate it
Added by Laura Downey about 19 years ago.
Updated about 12 years ago.
Description
need a way to uniquely identify actor in a workflow that is exposed to the
user so that if one person says look at actor X in workflow y, they know
exactly which one is being referenced. There could be many of the same kind
of actors in a workflow and users need a way to uniquely identify a specific
actor.
This could be done by making use of and exposing the actor ID. It could be
exposed in the general tab on the new proposed tabbed configuration dialog for
an actor.
Searching by actor ID could be added to the advanced search.
How this would work is not clear. Is the ID the LSID? If so, it may not be the
best to expose. Also, we need to differentiate between a class of actor (e.g.,
Constant) and a particular instance of that class that might be present in
multiple clones in a workflow. Its not clear that the clones have different LSIDs.
More actor identification considerations (as identified at SANParks meeting):
a) Grid on canvas to locate actors
b) Unique short labels to identify actors
c) Search for actors within the canvas
Ptolemy now includes a way to highlight errors. I'm not
sure if this change is present in Kepler or not. The highlight
facility is what would be used to indicate the target actor.
In principle, it is possible to open up a model as a URL and
have the correct layer show up. For example, if I have model
Foo that has an inner composite actor called Bar and I want to
see the actor Baz, then currently, opening
Foo.xml#Bar should bring up a graph editor for Bar.
Perhaps we should extend this so that
Foo.xml#Bar?actor=Baz
would bring up a graph editor for Bar and highlight Baz.
The above is just an idea, not a requirement.
One of the Ptolemy Project sponsors is interested in something
similar.
https://chess.eecs.berkeley.edu/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=19
"Search for where parameters are being used"
is very short, it says:
It would be nice if we could show were a parameter is being used
in a model. This ties in to a search mechanism.
The hooking up this highlighting feature with the 'Outline' tab would be a great first step!
BTW - the ptII tree has a find feature that allows the user to search for
actors or parameters by name.
ptolemy.vergil.basic.BasicGraphFrame has an inner class named FindAction
that displays the result using ptolemy.vergil.basic.SearchResultsDialog
To get search in to Kepler could be as easy as updating the Kepler menu system.
Original Bugzilla ID was 2123
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