[GRASS5] Ideas

[Justin Hickey]

Hello Tim

Tim Cera wrote:
> Maybe they are identical, it depends on one thing: will the curses
> interface use your Tcl/Tk scripts to build the curses interface
> screens?  What I was thinking about is a separate file that describes
> the dialog (maybe that is a better word?) that would be used by all
> interfaces; curses, Tcl/Tk, web ...etc.

Ahh! OK, I understand what you are proposing. You are basically going
one step further than I am.

> That's it.  The interface system (curses, Tcl/Tk, ...whatever) would
> be responsible for parsing, display, and collection of user inputs.

Let me see if I got it this time. Your proposal is to create a single
document for each interface dialog which would contain all the static
entities for said dialog. Then a parser for a particular GUI will read
this file and create the appropriate interface dialog. Is that right?
 
> Now, the problems that have cropped up as I have thought about this.
> How do you handle input sanity checks? With a web browser you use
> JavaScript which would be much too big.  I have thought of a couple
> other ways, but none of them elegant.  What about large tables, like
> what happens with r.reclass?  No solution to that either.  Maybe XML
> would be a better dialog builder?

Yes, as Eric suggested XML or SGML would be the tool to use to implement
your proposal. As for sanity checking, the place to put that is in
whatever program is called when you click OK. If this is written in C
then you don't need anything like Javascript. Yes, it would be nice to
do sanity checks on the fly, but the data has to be passed to a C
function eventually to get to GRASS, so the sanity check might as well
be a C function as well. That way all interfaces use the same sanity
checks.

Interesting idea, and it would probably be nice to have, however, as you
said in your first post, it would be a lot of work.

-- 
Sincerely,

Jazzman (a.k.a. Justin Hickey)  e-mail: jhickey at hpcc.nectec.or.th
High Performance Computing Center
National Electronics and Computer Technology Center (NECTEC)
Bangkok, Thailand
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