New to Dolphin - Default view ???

> Dan,
>
>
>>I am new to Dolphin
>
>
> Welcome aboard.
>
>
>
>>I have a model, a view and a presenter.  In the view, I defined a
>>context menu.  If I test the presenter, all is well.  I see the elements
>>I have defined, and the menu.
>
>
> It sounds like you've met the ViewComposer.  It's job is to build, edit and
> then serialize (using Dolphin's binary filer) a prototype (as in the Gang of
> Four's Prototype pattern) instance of a view.  Each prototype instance
> appears to us as as a "view resource" and associated with the presenter by
> the name you give it when saving in the VC.
>
>
>
>>What I want to do is add an unknown number of these presenters to a
>>container view with a grid layout.  when I do that, creating each
>>presenter with 'new', I get the information I expect, but not the menu.
>>  Is there a way to add the default view of a presenter to the container
>>view.  When I try to force that, I get a separate window for each
>>instance (but the menu works :)
>
>
> I'm somewhat surprised that it works that well :)  You might want to have a
> look at my Pane Holders package that you can find on my web site.  It
> provides various approaches to dynamic MVP.  One of them might be what you
> want, or you might be able to adapt it to get the behavior you want.
>
> You seem  to be well on your way, but if you haven't done so already, you
> might want to follow one or more of the MVP tutorials that are available to
> see how Dolphin's MVP framework "thinks".  That will help you to understand
> where and how it might be fighting you a little.
>
> Have a good one,
>
> Bill
>
> --
> Wilhelm K. Schwab, Ph.D.
> [hidden email]
>
>
>
>

> Dan,
>
>
>>I'll have a look at Pane Holders.
>>
>>I mentioned that I am new to Dolphin, but I'm not new to Smalltalk.
>
>
> I suspected as much.  Still, the MVP tutorials will help you understand the
> framework and help you better convince it to do what you want.
>
>
>
>>Maybe I should have started by asking how people really work with
>>Dolphin.  I know with VisualAge, there's the stuff you get from IBM,
>>then there's all the stuff you buy to make life easier.
>
>
> Go to Ian Bartholomew's web site for the Chunk Browser.  You'll also want to
> get either his news archive browser or DSDN which he and I built together.
> Either tool will allow you to search the newsgroup archives that you'll find
> on Ian's web site - don't miss out :)
>
> Beyond that, there's a lot of other nice stuff available.  The Dolphin web
> ring will get you going, as will a good search engine.
>
>
>
>>The View
>>Composer seemed like a simple way to create the composits of the stuff
>>that I had written, extended, etc..  Now it seems like that's not the
>>way to go.
>
>
> That depends.  Picture the grass on the other side of the fence.  The VC is
> great for some tasks, and something to be avoided for others.  Look at
> ViewGenerator in my goodies.  It is the basis for something that I use to
> generate a seriously big (700+ controls, and that simply counts them once
> but many are repeated) user interface for one of our research projects.  I'd
> hate to think about drag and drop as way to construct it, but, there is a
> lot of meta data that a ViewGenerator subclass can parse to do the dirty
> work.
>
> In favor of the VC, I've been doing a lot of experimental prodding with
> Squeak, and suspect that many of its user interface elements would be a lot
> nicer in appearance if a drag and drop tool were available for assembling
> Morphic interfaces.  Ideally a system should make it easy to build GUIs by
> code alone and by drag and drop so one can choose.  You'll find both
> approaches represented in Dolphin with the right goodies installed.
>
>
>
>>Assuming my project looks like this:
>>
>>MyObjects
>>Views on my objects
>>Composit views of those views, menus, buttons and lists
>>
>>Where (if anywhere) would the ViewComposer become useful? Is it ever
>>necessary?
>
>
> Try the various tutorials.  The VC is perhaps never truly necessary, but
> there are many situations when you would want to use it.  Its role would be
> to build (generally composite) views for the presenters.
>
>
>
>>Is there a better way of presenting the view to the user if
>>I want that view to have custom functionality.
>
>
> You might be referring to creating your own subclasses of View.  I seem to
> do that mostly for graphics vs. text interfaces.  Even then, the VC can be
> useful for putting the custom view into other composites, or even just in a
> shell to be displayed to the end user.  This kind of thing will probably be
> easier to kick around in the context of a specific problem.
>
> Have a good one,
>
> Bill
>
> --
> Wilhelm K. Schwab, Ph.D.
> [hidden email]
>
>
>

> Dan,
>
>
>>               For lack of a
>>better descriptor, I'm trying to present a thumbnail view of (n)
>>objects.  What I want to present doesn't fit well in columns, so I
>>wanted to have a series of little form parts in a grid.
>
>
> I had a similar problem when I wrote the ImageLibrary.  I wanted to display
> all the icons/cursors/bitmaps in the library, organised into rows and the
> whole collection to be scrollable.  I needed to fit as many images on a row
> as I could with the height of a row being defined by the height of the
> tallest item within each row.  In the end I defined a new View subclass that
> knew how to position the images it was passed (it just draws them on the
> view's canvas, no subviews needed) and put this view within a scrolling
> container to look after that aspect.  It's available as part of my
> ImageLibrary goodie if you want a look.
>

> Right now, I'm creating all the windows from code in a workspace. I have
>
> Shell
>    ScrollingDecorator
>      ContainerView (grid layout)
>
> I am adding my views to the ContainerView
>
> I need to be able to change the attributes of the containerView, as
> items get added to or dropped from the list, and to enable some
> different viewing options.

> That's good to hear. So is it possible to create a view/presenter
> combination and add it dynamically during program operation, with all
> the defined features (like menus)?  A more concrete example is an
> applicaiton I have done in VAST.  I have a system that can be configured
> to monitor/alter certain control parameters.  The parameters are in
> groups. The initial view of the system is the most basic group only, as
> a single tab in a notebook style part.  The user can select up to 4
> additional tabs, which are different views entirely.  Once they save
> their settings, that's how the part will open.  Each time, as the part
> opens, I add the tabs they have selected.  The views aren't hidden, they
> simply aren't added until requested.  The users can also rearrange the
> order and, if they wanted to, they could add multiple copies of one part.

> Dan,
>
>
>>That's good to hear. So is it possible to create a view/presenter
>>combination and add it dynamically during program operation, with all
>>the defined features (like menus)?  A more concrete example is an
>>applicaiton I have done in VAST.  I have a system that can be configured
>>to monitor/alter certain control parameters.  The parameters are in
>>groups. The initial view of the system is the most basic group only, as
>>a single tab in a notebook style part.  The user can select up to 4
>>additional tabs, which are different views entirely.  Once they save
>>their settings, that's how the part will open.  Each time, as the part
>>opens, I add the tabs they have selected.  The views aren't hidden, they
>>simply aren't added until requested.  The users can also rearrange the
>>order and, if they wanted to, they could add multiple copies of one part.
>
>
> Have a look at the package at http://www.idb.me.uk/test.pac
>
> It's not quite what you describe (you can have as many pages as you like and
> they can't be reordered) but is, I think, pretty close?
>
> The 4 Presenter subclasses are separate MVP components.  One, TestPage, is
> used as a default page and is always present.  The others can be added "on
> the fly" by selecting the appropriate button.  Each tab is separate so edits
> to one don't affect any of the other tabs which may be the of same class.
> Pressing the save button saves the state of the main shell and the contents
> of each page - opening a new shell reloads these values.
>
> I wasn't sure how you wanted to connect all these up to a model, or models,
> so I've left that part out.  You'd obviously incorporate the persistence
> mechanism (I've just used a file) into that.
>
> Each page (except the default - because I forgot) has a context menu with
> two items.  One is local and executes a method in the appropriate presenter
> and the other is global and executes a method in the main shell.
>
> This is all a bit (oh alright - very) rough but might give you some ideas.
>
> Ian
>
>
>

> Dan,
>
>
>>I think if I was putting together a
>>viewer to work with one instance at a time, I'd be fine.  For lack of a
>>better descriptor, I'm trying to present a thumbnail view of (n)
>>objects.
>
>
> This is the area in which Dolphin's MVP framework is the least prepared to
> help.  That's not to say that you can't get it done, but I'm not aware of
> anything in Dolphin as delivered that solves the problem.
>

>
>
>>What I want to present doesn't fit well in columns, so I
>>wanted to have a series of little form parts in a grid.  I could get
>>that to work, I just couldn't get the menus to work, because, as you
>>suspected, I added the context menu in the ViewComposer.
>
>
> Do you mean "form" in the sense of VB or Smalltalk-80?  Put another way, is
> it a composite presenter or is it a picture?  When dealing with arrays of
> composite presenters, I typically use the vertical lists in Pane Holders.
> If it's a bunch of thumbnail images, there is nothing to stop you from
> drawing them in their correct places, hit testing which gets clicked, and
> asking it for a menu to display.  The more I do things like that, the
> happier my users get because the result is faster and more reliable.  I'm
> leaving out some intermediate steps of course, but you can set up the
> one-off test fairly easily.
>

>
>>For now, I've solved my problem by adding the context menu to the views
>>as I create the instances.  I'm not sure that's the best way to go, but
>>I't seems to work.
>
>
> There is nothing wrong with it.  If you go with the Pane Holders/vertical
> list (or your own derivative) approach, you could put the menus in the view
> resources and associate the view resources with the elements in the list.
>
>
>
>>Right now, I'm creating all the windows from code in a workspace. I have
>>
>>Shell
>>   ScrollingDecorator
>>     ContainerView (grid layout)
>>
>>I am adding my views to the ContainerView
>>
>>I need to be able to change the attributes of the containerView, as
>>items get added to or dropped from the list, and to enable some
>>different viewing options.
>
>
> Look for #viewNamed:.  Ian has made some nice use of it in at least a couple
> of his goodies.  Prior to learning that trick from Ian, I named the
> container view and attached a CompositePresenter (which would for Dolphin>=5
> be Presenter) to it in #createComponents.  Either approach works.  The
> latter approach automatically caches the result, but you can do the same
> thing yourself by simply not calling #viewNamed: inside loops etc., or by
> adding an instance variable that you assign once, probably in #onViewOpened.
>
>
>
>>Of course, I also want to add a bunch of menu options, some status
>>stuff, ect.  I'm assumming that I can use the ViewComposer for the
>>static stuff, and the window layout down to the container. I could then
>>reference the container and take care of everything else in code.  Is
>>that wishful thinking on my part ?
>
>
> It will probably work.  You might not like the results for very large
> numbers of objects though.  That's what finally pushed me over the edge
> toward realizing that native widgets ultimately produce colored pixels on
> the screen, and if I can do that more efficiently some other way, the result
> is happier users and probably more portable code too.
>
> Have a good one,
>
> Bill

> >>A more concrete example is an
> >>applicaiton I have done in VAST.  I have a system that can be configured
> >>to monitor/alter certain control parameters.  The parameters are in
> >>groups. The initial view of the system is the most basic group only, as
> >>a single tab in a notebook style part.  The user can select up to 4
> >>additional tabs, which are different views entirely.  Once they save
> >>their settings, that's how the part will open.  Each time, as the part
> >>opens, I add the tabs they have selected.  The views aren't hidden, they
> >>simply aren't added until requested.  The users can also rearrange the
> >>order and, if they wanted to, they could add multiple copies of one

> Dan,
>
>
>>>>That's good to hear. So is it possible to create a view/presenter
>>>>combination and add it dynamically during program operation, with all
>>>>the defined features (like menus)?
>>>
>
> There was a recent thread (28/11/02) entitled "Better MVP Resources" where I
> posted a reply that showed how to dynamically create a scrollable array of
> sub-components. This may (or may not) be the sort of thing you're looking
> for. For the attached code you'll have to be using a news server that
> supports attachments (news.totallyobjects.com is one).
>
>
>>>>A more concrete example is an
>>>>applicaiton I have done in VAST.  I have a system that can be configured
>>>>to monitor/alter certain control parameters.  The parameters are in
>>>>groups. The initial view of the system is the most basic group only, as
>>>>a single tab in a notebook style part.  The user can select up to 4
>>>>additional tabs, which are different views entirely.  Once they save
>>>>their settings, that's how the part will open.  Each time, as the part
>>>>opens, I add the tabs they have selected.  The views aren't hidden, they
>>>>simply aren't added until requested.  The users can also rearrange the
>>>>order and, if they wanted to, they could add multiple copies of one
>>>
> part.
>
> In Dolphin, you'll probably want to override #onViewOpened in the parent
> presenter so you can build the child tabs that you need. Bear in mind that
> the PublishedAspectInspector used by Flipper and the ViewComposer
> essentially does something similar to show the appropriate tabs each time an
> aspect is selected. Take a look at
> PublishedAspectInpector>>createAspectPresenters:.
>

> Best Regards,
>
> Andy Bower
> Dolphin Support
> http://www.object-arts.com
> ---
> Are you trying too hard?
> http://www.object-arts.com/Relax.htm
> ---
>
>