search

ControlSystemStudio / phoebus

A framework and set of tools to monitor and operate large scale control systems, such as the ones in the accelerator community.
http://phoebus.org/
Eclipse Public License 1.0
91 stars 89 forks source link

More flexible Phoebus Layout memento file selection proposal. #3133

Open wbadgett opened 1 month ago

wbadgett commented 1 month ago

When one has many memento Phoebus Layout files, the Phoebus layout selector popup pane becomes very large. May I propose using a more flexible approach, at least recognizing subdirectories in the ${HOME}/.phoebus area? Or bring up a general purpose file browser? What would be the best approach?

kasemir commented 1 month ago

Previous EPICS display managers (edd/dm, medm, dm2k, edm, ...) didn't have any idea of a layout. You open some top-level "start" display, and on there you'd typically have some top-level view of the machine with buttons to drill down via related displays. The result is a well-known startup scenario from which you can reach what you need within a few clicks. With layouts we offer a few different starting points. On a Beamline/instrument, you thus may have a "User" and "Expert" option. But if the layout menu turns into a multi-page phone book, the "shortcut" idea is somewhat lost.

So I think it's a bad idea.

Technically, however, I suggest you add AppResourceDescriptor support for *memento files to the UI framework. That way, you could start CSS with a -resource /path/to/xx.mememto command line option, or click on a *memento file in the file browser. That App would then load the memento.