[Pipet Devel] Thoughts on Network/Composite Inputs and Outputs

[Brad Chapman]

Jeff wrote:
> The idea that I had was that the I/O's (links) you DIDN'T want 
mapped to the
> parent could be explicitly HIDDEN.  This is the opposite of what you 
propose
> below (where you bring up some good points), because everything gets 
mapped
> by
> default.  I just wanted to mention this, because it is not as though 
the user
> could not (when implemented) "unmap" a link.

Yup, I'm with you completely on your ideas. I thought they were plenty 
snazzy when you wrote about 'em (which is why I spend the time 
implementing them!), and it really took seeing them in action to find 
the problems that I noted. You know the paradigm -> build one to throw 
away (well, in our case, build 12 to throw away :-).

[...my proposal for making NetInput/Outputs work like Overflow...]
> Great.  I say we go ahead and do that, and we can nix the option to 
hide a
> link (explicitly unmapping a link).  

Sounds good, I'll do it then, unless anyone else raises an objection 
soon.

>  I think what we can do is place a "P" in
> the dot, indicating that communication is from/to Parent.  In 
addition, the
> dot can turn green when its mapped counterpart on the parent is also 
green. 

Sounds good!

> Can the DL send that information (whether the link on the parent is 
connected
> or not) to all the child nodes?
> Not literally to the nodes.  The UI will get information from the DL 
about the
> state of a link, correct?

Right now I give connection information (telling the UI when to 
connect things) through the following callback function:

		  void showConnection(in Locus inLocus, in Connector inConnector, 
						   in Locus outLocus, in Connector outConnector);

(there is an equivalent "hideConnection"). I guess for this case what 
we should do is just pass a single Locus and Connector to "be 
connected" (and pass the other set as NULL). Since I can't really 
think of another case where this will happen, the UI can interpret 
this as being due to a "Parent" connector being mapped. Sound okay?

>> The user would then also supply a name for it (like in
>> Overflow) and then this name would help associate the NetInput with
>> the internal locus connector to which it is associated.
> 
> Shouldn't links have names by default?  And then the user can change 
it if
> they want.

Okay, but I'm not sure what the "default" name should be so that I'll 
be easily recognizable. What I've been doing internally is munging 
together the "name" of the locus inside of a composite (ie. Constant3) 
with the name of the link (so ending up with something like 
Constant3--VALUE as the name in the parent). But this "Constant3" info 
isn't available to the user in the ui (all they see is constant) so I 
don't think this name'll be very meaningful. How do you want to handle 
the default? 


Brad