[Uml-devel] Umbrello2

[Andrew Sutton]

On Wednesday 26 February 2003 12:32 pm, Mathias Meyer wrote:
> On Wednesday 26 February 2003 18:22 Andrew Sutton wrote:
> > if somebody wants to start working on a gui framework, we could
> > definitely start from there - basically, it should just be a standard
> > KDE app - i'd like to embed ksvg for all the diagrams - it looks alot
> > better than regular canvas apps and good looking graphics are important
> > to me. of course, that decision has yet to be finalized :)
>
> I agree, good looking graphics are very important and SVG would be really
> nice. Then also this nasty canvas zooming could be avoided ;)
>
> Any plan for a GUI layout for now?

gui layout... here's an idea: we're all familiar with the "Use Case View", 
"Logical View" and "Deployment View" concepts right? essentially hardcoded 
packages that contain various parts of the UML model. We can generalize this 
concept to describe abstract views of the model - for example, we could a 
"Development View" that would contain things like UML::Artifact objects 
(stereotyped as header or source files). basically, it would show diagrams of 
the build environment and relationships (e.g., #include dependencies) between 
them. to contain these "abstract views" i was thinking that we could take the 
standard tree view (a la 1.x) and turn it into a tab view - each tab contains 
a tree with the relevant objects contained therein (more like kdevelop).

we should include the possibility to work on diagrams in multiple top-level 
windows. that should work really well with large design projects and 
multihead displays. for each window there should be an associated toolbar 
that contains icons representing all the elements that can be applied to the 
specific type of diagram - including non-databound graphical artifacts like 
boxes and text labels. those generic tools should be applicable to all 
diagrams.

any property dialogs that are popped up should be... what's the right word. 
modal? probably not. we should allow the user to throw up lots of property 
dialogs. modifications to properties of an object should be reflected in the 
diagram as properties change. for example, clicking the "isAbstract" checkbox 
on a class should automatically change the font of the class name to italics 
or plain (depending on the value).

thoughts?