[Uml-devel] Thoughts about U2 "tree view"

[Andrew Sutton]

On Wednesday 07 May 2003 05:16 pm, Sebastian Stein wrote:
> today I had some time to think about Umbrello 2. Well I came up with the
> idea, that different users prefer different kind of views. So think about
> the Linux Magazin article who asked for a tree view centered around
> diagrams. Andy might find a really different view. And maybe some people
> will also like classical tree views very much.
>
> But every kind of view has the same function. In the end the user should
> click on a line of the view and maybe a new diagram will open, a box to
> edit an operation will be shown and so on. Also the right click popup menus
> will be the same.
>
> It would be really crazy to reimplement all these things every time we
> create a new view (plugin). Couldn't we identify a common base for all
> these views like in the code generators in U1? I would really like to have
> the possibility to exchange the view by loading another plugin.
>
> Any thoughts on that?

yes. that's probably what i was going to do eventually, i haven't really 
gotten too deep into the gui stuff too much. it might take a little bit of 
analysis, but we should be able to create some kind of base view that 
provides common functionality if we need to (we might not).

the only thing that i'd suggest being careful of is the data independence of 
what's represented in the tree view. that could represent several objects 
from several different metamodels - we always use UML as the example, but it 
could also represent CWM data. actions corresponding to objects in different 
metamodels will almost certainly be different.

andy