Comparison Viewer Rendering Plugin

This document describes the comparison viewer rendering plugin architecture and how to create and add a new viewer rendering plugin to the MBAT Comparison Viewer Workspace.

Architecture

• TODO

Events

• JLayerGUI^?: TODO

Requirements Specification

This section describes the expected behavior for the rendering plugins.

• Error Handling
  • To ensure graceful handling of errors that occur when loading data, the rendering plugin will throw the following exceptions:
    • java.io.FileNotFoundException (bad file name)
    • java.net.MalformedURLException (bad URL)
    • java.net.UnknownHostException (wrong URL)
    • java.util.zip.DataFormatException (unrecognized or bad data format)
    • net.nbirn.mbat.core.datatypes.mbObjectException (unsupported mbObject)
    • javax.media.opengl.GLException (OpenGL^? error)
    • java.io.IOException (URL connection error, HTTP page not found, general exception)
  • Note: if your error does not fit into any of the above categories, you can use IOException as a general exception. We just require a meaningful description of the error in the exception's detail message (ie: ex.getMessage()).
• Linking
  • TODO

For testing purposes, please document the following on the MouseBIRN Partner Plugins wiki page:

1. User Manual
   1. Introduction (brief description of intent and use of plugin)
   2. Getting Started (describe how to load data into your plugin)
   3. File Formats Supported (describe what types of file can be loaded by your plugin)
   4. Cart Objects Supported (describe what types of cart objects can be loaded by your plugin)
   5. User Interface (describe how to interact and manipulate your plugin)
2. Functional Specification
   1. Data Input Methods (describe which methods of loading your plugin are supported)
   2. Serializing/Deserializing (descibe what states (ie: translation, scale, rotation, opacity, brightness, contrast, etc) are saved during serialization and what states are restored during deserialization)
   3. Linking (descibe the behavior when layers are linked together (ie: adjusting brightness on master layer adjusts brightness to same level on slave layers).
   4. Workspace Interoperability (describe how you expect the returned data to used in other workspaces)
   5. Error Handling (describe how you handle the error cases above)

Creating a new plugin

Plugin class

1. Inherit from existing layer (JLayerImage2D, JLayerImage3D?)
   1. display()
   2. createLayerGUIFactory()
2. Inherit from base layer (dlLayer)

Customize status bar

For classes that inherit from JLayerImage2D, you can customize the size, position, color, and text of the status bar. The JLayerImage2D saves the status bar size, position, and color properties and can be accessed using the getters/setters for !StatusBarDimension(), StatusBarPosition(), ColorStatusBarBG(), ColorStatusBarBGDark(). The default status bar is drawn as an fully opaque rectangle with a color gradient, with the ColorStatusBarBG color at the top to the ColorStatusBarBGDark color at the bottom.

The default drawStatusBar method calls 3 methods shown below. Derived classes can override any of these methods to customize the status bar.

public void drawStatusBar ( GL gl, int w, int h )
{
    // set status bar dimension and position
    setStatusBarDimensionPosition( w,h );
    // draw status bar background
    drawStatusBarBackground( gl, w, h );
    // draw status bar text
    drawStatusBarText( gl, w, h );
}

Configuring Plugin Properties

To configure how your Viewer plugin gets instantiated and loaded by the Viewer Workspace GUI, you must add the following required parameters to the plugin.xml:

<extension plugin-id="net.nbirn.mbat.plugins.viewer.core" point-id="Viewer" id="JLayerImage2D"> ... <parameter id="supportsLoadFromFile" value="true"/> <parameter id="supportsLoadFromCart" value="true"/> <parameter id="supportsAddLayer" value="true"/> </extension>

Parameters: