[Pipet Devel] Re: overflow<->loci translation and 3 basic gui objects

[J.W. Bizzaro]

Gary Van Domselaar wrote:
> 
> The second concept concerns the connections/links made from one application/node/icon to
> another.
...
> The third concept concerns nesting of 'networks'.
...

Thanks Gary.  Basically, XML representations of the GUI are concatonated
(placed end-to-end) when the nodes are related by simple link:

    <NodeGUI 1>
    </NodeGUI 1>
    <NodeGUI 2>
    </NodeGUI 2>

But when the nodes are related by nesting (a node contains a network of
nodes), XML representations are nested:

    <NodeGUI 1>
        <NodeGUI 2>
        </NodeGUI 2>
    </NodeGUI 1>

And both formats can be translated directly to Gtk: The first format places
widgets/GUIs in adjacent cells in a table, and the second format places one
widget/GUI inside of another (NodeGUI 1 is the container for NodeGUI 2). 
(Remember, the widget/GUI appears in the window of the node that is parent to
the network.)

Now, you may be thinking 'Hey, this is going to produce one very big GUI, if
the parent has a network containing 100s of nodes!'  But the trick (and a very
neat one at that) is that the GUIs from individual nodes can be switched on
and off.  Recall that I mentioned you can switch between network and GUI views
in each window.  Well, switch a node's window view to network (and not GUI),
and its GUI won't appear in its parent's GUI.  And this can all be saved!  The
result is, you have custom-taylored GUIs for each node.

Jeff
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                      +----------------------------------+
                      |           J.W. Bizzaro           |
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                      | http://bioinformatics.org/~jeff/ |
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                      |        BIOINFORMATICS.ORG        |
                      |           The Open Lab           |
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                      |    http://bioinformatics.org/    |
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