Kepler

The search dialog is definitely useful when working with large workflows.

In Kepler, adding a search field in the Outline tab to perform this functionality instead of using a separate dialog would make the UI more consistent since the Components and Data tabs already have search fields. The search field for the Outline tab would filter the workflow tree (similar to the search field for Components). If this is too difficult to add for 2.4, then it's easy to add the search dialog to the menus.

Decided that a search bar will be added to the outline.

I added a search panel for the workflow outline.

It'd be nice if clicking on the results highlighted the actors on the canvas similar to Ptolemy's SearchResultsDialog, but the highlighting methods are not accessible outside of SearchResultsDialog. I also noticed they are mostly duplicated in BasicGraphController. Instead of duplicating them again in Kepler, maybe they could move to BasicGraphFrame?

Feel free to refactor the methods in SearchResultsDialog into BasicGraphFrame.
Note that there is this method in BasicGraphFrame:

/** Opens the nearest composite actor above the target in the hierarchy * and possibly change the zoom and centering to show the target. * This method is useful for displaying search results and actors that * cause errors. * @param target The target. * @param owner The frame that, per the user, is generating the dialog.
*/
public static void openComposite(final Frame owner, final NamedObj target) {

It is unfortunate that Kepler can't just use SearchReultsDialgo class, it seems basic enough.

When a search is done in the workflow outline, the tree is expanded to show the matching items. However, adding a highlight to an actor causes the tree to be collapsed. It might be possible to avoid this, but this can done for a later release.

Original Bugzilla ID was 5633