search

bkloppenborg / simtoi

The SImulation and Modeling Tool for Optical Interferometry
GNU General Public License v3.0
7 stars 6 forks source link

Units do not appear #105

Closed fabienbaron closed 9 years ago

fabienbaron commented 9 years ago

Users can (will !) be confused by the lack of units. We should add a column with the units.

bkloppenborg commented 9 years ago

To do this you will need to modify a bunch of bits within SIMTOI. For example you will start in CGLWidget::RebuildTree. Add an extra column to the header (you'll see the row in this function), then modify CGLWidget::RebuildTree to query the CParameterItem for some aptly named function (i.e. getUnits). Add the getUnits function to CParameterItem (or is it CParameterMap... I forget, it'll be obvious though) and propagate the change all the way down to CParameter. I don't want users editing the units (parsing units is a horrible pain), so whoever implements this needs to ensure the item is marked as not editable.

Then you'll have a place where the units can be displayed, but there is a lot more to do.

Then modify the CParameter::addParameter function to take a unit argument. (I suppose you could just add an extra constructor that takes units and leave the others as-is, but I'd rather have everything supporting such a critical part of the program).

After this the save and restore functions need to be modified to write and read (but ignore/override) the unit flag (we don't want to support arbitrary units... that'll be a nightmare). I suppose we could just not write the units to the file, but I would rather have the data stored there. Lets discuss this.

therob762 commented 9 years ago

Ultimately, what I would like to see added to the model tree is the "help" field in the parameter array, i.e. for "g_pole" -> "Gravity at the pole (units: m/s^2)". Are you saying that adding this as a column will require the work stated above? This is will not only give the user the units, but provide a needed definition for what the parameter represents. For example, what are the definitions of phi and theta in the spot feature.

bkloppenborg commented 9 years ago

@therob762 My next job in the gui_overhaul branch will be to re-implement the GUI for the parameters. I intend to have the help field show up as a tool tip when the user hovers over a row (rather than have it be permanently displayed). I would refrain from doing the work to add tool tips in the current master/develop branch as I will be implementing these features this weekend in gui_overhaul

fabienbaron commented 9 years ago

Tooltips are very 1990s... Next, drop-down menus... :P We should just modify the column "name" to be more informative. This will take barely more space (none of the units should be more than a few characters long) and can be done in 20 minutes tops for all the models.

bkloppenborg commented 9 years ago

The tooltip now displays units as specified in the model.