[GRASS5] Interfaces ... (long)

[Jan-Oliver Wagner]

On Sat, Jul 07, 2001 at 04:27:43PM -0700, Eric G. Miller wrote:
> I've made a few of the minor alterations to XML interface that I
> previously mentioned.  If everyone is cool with these changes, then I'll
> commit them (it will break the proof-of-concept dialog generator that
> Jan built).
> 
> Changes:
> 
>    * There is now a distinct element called "flag" separate from
>      "parameter".  It takes an attribute "name", and has an optional
>      child element for the "description".
> 
>    * Make both "flag" and "parameter" be children of "task" directly.
>      This is now the default output, however the DTD still has the
>      "parameter-group" with children "description", "parameter", and
>      "flag".  It is retained for the future possibility of having
>      groups of mutually exclusive options.  I started to implement such
>      a thing, but it would require almost a complete rewrite of
>      parser.c.

the dialog generator is updated to handle the new way of flags.

>    * Add a "keydesc" element as an optional child of "parameter".  This
>      corresponds to the "key_desc" member of an Option struct.  It has
>      children called "item", each with an attribute of "order" so that
>      the proper ordering can be insured for the "tuple".

I am not sure whether this type of paramter is useful anyway.
I realize that it makes command line shorter.
However, the type (eg string,float) of the single elements could
not be identified this way. To my  mind such comma-separated lists
are better be treated as groups of parameters.
I realize this would mean changes in parser.c and for many grass commands.

No solution to handle this in the GUI has come to my mind that I liked.
Any proposals?
BTW, it seems that some commands define key_desc with a single
entry - what is the idea behind this?

>    * Add a "gisprompt" element as an optional child of "parameter".
>      This is an empty element corresponding to "gisprompt" of the Option
>      struct.  It has three required attributes:
> 
>        + "age" - The "age" part of the gisprompt argument ("old", "new",
>        		"any", or "mapset")
>        + "element" - The mapset "element" part of the gisprompt
>                	argument ("cell", "dig", "site_lists", etc...)
>        + "prompt" -  What should be displayed to the user for a prompt.

No good idea came to my mind how to handle this in the gui generator.
Also, I am not sure whether I have understood the concept of
gisprompts.

Jan

-- 
Jan-Oliver Wagner               http://intevation.de/~jan/

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