[rkward-devel] Request for feedback on new plugin features, and plot history

[Thomas Friedrichsmeier]

Hi,

I had meant to write this mail much earlier, but never found the time: The 
current development version has some new features which we need feedback on. 
You can get it from SVN as usual, but if you're running Ubuntu or openSUSE, 
you can also find compiled packages at https://launchpad.net/~rkward-
devel/+archive/rkward-devel and 
https://build.opensuse.org/project/show?project=home%3Atfry-suse%3Arkward-
devel , respectively.

--

The first area that needs some testing and feeback is the plot history feature 
which Prasenjit has added to the graphics windows. Basically, please create a 
few plots in one or more windows, try the toolbar buttons, and comment on any 
aspect that is not intuitive, or buggy. Prasenjit, if you have a bit of time, 
could you summarize the remaining questions, again?

--

The second area that I would like to pick your brains about is some new plugin 
features. Perhaps you recall this short thread on how to deal with plugins 
that do data.frame specific transformations: http://www.mail-
archive.com/rkward-devel at lists.sourceforge.net/msg00779.html . The development 
snapshots have some variants of a solution for that. To try it, frist make 
sure that the under_development.pluginmap is activated under Settings-
>Configure RKWard->Plugins.

You should see a new top-level menu called "Data". In this, there are two 
variants of a "Sort data" plugin, and you will want to try each
a) while you are editing a data.frame, and the data.frame is the active window 
and
b) while any other window is active.
As you will see, in case b), both plugins will seem identical. In case a), the 
active data.frame is preselected in both plugins, but the first variant still 
allows to select a different data.frame to sort.

Key questions on that:
- Which variant of the plugin is preferrable?
- Do you think it is intuitively clear, when a data.frame is "active"? 
Suggestions for improving this?

You may also want to look at the "Generate random data" plugin. Here, when a 
data.frame is active, the generated data will be added to that data.frame by 
default. When no data.frame is active, the generated data will be added to the 
.GlobalEnv by default. In both cases, the <saveobject>-element at the bottom 
allows to select a different place to save to (which is new, as well).

Finally, plugin developers will be interested in taking a look at the 
technical side of these plugins. The code for them can to be found in 
plugins/data. You will see note two things:
- The active object (currently data.frames, only) is available from a property 
called "current_object". If no object is active, this is an empty string.
- There is a <script>-block, which allows scripting of the dialog itself, 
instead of the generated code. Here, it is mainly used to check whether or not 
the selected object is a data.frame. I hope you can figure out the meaning of 
the code in the <script>-block yourself, and if you can't, that probably means 
I need to change things.

One further plugin to show some more possibilities of plugin scripting is in 
Analysis/QtScript Test 1 (code is in plugins/tests). I suppose this will be 
particularly interesting to Meik, who has been asking for similar 
functionality in the past. Please let me know what you think (since this is 
totally undocumented ATM, you may want to take a look at 
scriptbackends/rkcompnentscripting.js as a reference of implemented 
functionality).

Well, take your time, we don't need to rush decisions on any of this, but it 
would be cool, if you could take a look at these new features, and share your 
thoughts.

Regards
Thomas
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