Group and View

• Motivation
  • Nicholas: one needs to be able to show and elide various parts of architecture, as different views, depending on purpose
• Group, as currently designed and implemented
  • Group tied into the architecture description, rather than as a visualization element
  • Membership as a set of instances
  • Membership updated automatically by the tool, when rule changes, or when a member element is deleted
• View, proposed
  • View as [ style ]
  • Highlighting and unhighlighting of elements of that style, just as vis props can be hidden or shown
  • No "projection" as yet
• Main point
  • Of various ways you can get visualizations, which one should be supported, which is best, etc.?
  • Three ways for membership:
    • Ad hoc: point-and-click
    • Property-based: group based on property values of elements
    • Style-based on: ignore and reveal based on a style
  • Visualization desirata:
    • Hiding/unhiding
    • Relayout of revealed elements after hiding
    • Visual distinctions (in terms of colos perhaps) for different groups
• David's observations
  • Two things going on, the rule and the visualization
  • E.g., you might have a rule keyed on some port type, but you don't want to visualize the port itself
  • Possible to combine with layouts
• Brainstorm
  • Group
    • As in set theory, allow members by rule and by enumeration
    • Set operations, allow Union, Intersection, etc
    • How would combining group types work? Uh oh, type system predicates specifies conjunction
      • Perhaps we need to distinguish type system with group composition
      • Predicate conjunction useful for compositionality reasons (i.e., for safety rules, but not applicable to liveness)
• Questions & issues
  • Do we need dynamic group membership?
  • To what extent does one need ad hoc membership list, or is rule-based membership enough, or are both necessary?

Legends (Patrick)

• Initial idea
  • Different window for editing legend, that allows it to be dynamically updated
  • Output as picture (suggest: PNG)
• UI design?
  • A "Legend" box inside the diagram editor with GEF subfigures
  • Legend box would be same animal as a component box, can be moved, edited, etc.
  • Dynamism would be a bit hard, but might involve updating the legend box with element types that were added to the diagram
  • As a default start, generate a legend box with certain defaults
  • Legend editor can use all the functionalities of the diagram editor