[Pipet Devel] UI/DL and selection WAS executing a network script

[Brad Chapman]

Jeff wrote:
> BTW, I would like the DL to keep track of the nodes that are 
selected.  IOW,
> when the UI selects a node, it sends a request to the DL to consider 
that
> node
> selected.  Then, when the UI requests that the selected set of nodes 
(a
> subnet) be executed, the UI won't have to send a big list of nodes: 
the DL
> will already know what is part of the selected set.

I don't think this will work with the streaming XML api. Right now to 
do that you would have to do the following everytime a locus is 
clicked on (selected):

1. Muster an xml message in the front with something like:
<front>
  <select>
    <locus id = 'sfaaslfkja112' />
  </select>
</front>

2. Send this message through the socket to the dl.

3. The dl would then have to somehow store this information. Right now 
the dl stores pretty much everything the front sends it in xml (to 
make it permanent). We would need to rethink some of the design issues 
if want the dl to store information like selected loci for the ui. 
Anyways, If you want this kind of selected info stored in xml we would 
need to:
a. Open the xml file for the selected locus and set it as selected.
b. Open the xml file for the previously selected locus/loci (I'm not 
sure how I would keep track of this) and set them as no longer 
selected.

4. Return a message to the front indicating success or failure.

In my opinion, this is too much of a mess under the streaming XML 
dialog API, and if we want this really fine grained level of control 
we need to rethink things, and use CORBA to do the communication. Then 
it would be a function call like:

middle.set_selected(list_of_selected_loci)

instead of all that xml. The dl is also not designed with this kind of 
fine scale stuff in mind since I thought we were just dealing with 
large scale changes and not details like this, so we would also need 
to rethink things there.
    One of the reasons why I brought up the Berlin project on the list 
the other day is that I thought it might be a good model to help us 
figure out some of our design issues. They are working with having the 
whole GUI go through CORBA, and have it down to a set of idl 
interfaces, so there is probably a lot we can learn from there. But 
maybe I was off-base in seeing the similarity between the projects...

Brad