Brad Chapman wrote: > > > No, I was suggesting to you that the 'view we have now' (the > > workspace normal view) replace the GtkCTree view for taking > > listings of directories. The composite GUI will look like a > > regular Gtk interface. > > Okay...how can you then distinguish between moving a locus from > one workspace to another via dnd, and copying a locus unto a new > workspace via dnd (ie. if you are copying a saved locus onto to the > workspace to use, or if you are dragging a directory out of a > representation of a local filesystem)? Just as you would do any DnD between objects. The workspaces are all Gtk/Gnome objects. > Will the workspace need to keep > track of what kind of information it is holding? The middleware (the 3 layers) will need to keep track of what node is where. The front will do it in a more ephemeral way (using temporary GUI objects). > Similary, a > composite representing a save directory or local filesystem will need > to react different to loci that are dragged into them then a "regular" > workspace would. Why? How will they act differently? > I guess we would probably need to define two > different workspace types in the code. Maybe, if there really is a difference between a 'storage node' and a 'working node'. I say there is no difference. And, since we're making our own distributed pseudo-filesystem, it won't be such a stretch of the imagination as it would be with a Unix filesystem: We can MAKE IT so that there is no difference. > Also, how will a workspace be populated with gui representations > of loci if you, for instance, open up a save container full of loci? > Just stick them with equal spacing throughout the workspace, like > opening a directory on a mac? Yep. I'd hide the links/connectors by default, so it would look EXACTLY like a Mac folder in 'large icon' view. Hiding links would serve another purpose I recently realized. Recall how non-connected links mean the I/O is from/to the parent node, and if you want a true dataflow 'dead-end', you'd need to cap it off somehow. I would make hidden links mean dataflow dead-ends. Going back to the workspace as a 'storage node', it would be important to hide the links of stored nodes. One may store dozens or hundreds of nodes in such a place, and we wouldn't want all of those non-connected links to end up on the parent node ;-) Jeff -- +----------------------------------+ | J.W. Bizzaro | | | | http://bioinformatics.org/~jeff/ | | | | BIOINFORMATICS.ORG | | The Open Lab | | | | http://bioinformatics.org/ | +----------------------------------+