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mdenet / educationplatform

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Add panel definition for generated code #100

Closed agarciadom closed 10 months ago

agarciadom commented 10 months ago

The standard panel definitions only have one OutputPanel, and it seems to be for a "Problems" view (e.g. for EVL or OCL). It'd be good to have a panel definition for generated code, as that scenario could be quite common.

szschaler commented 10 months ago

@agarciadom thanks. Where is this panel used? Do we really need a separate type of panel?

The platform idea would be that there would be a suitable panel for the type of contents to show. For example, in a M2M scenario, you would have a source model, perhaps expresses in FLEXMI, and a transformation specification, say in ETL. You would then have a FlexMI panel for the source model, an XMI panel (or something else) for the meta-model, and an ETL panel for the transformation specification. You would also have a second FLEXMI panel for the target model, which might initially be empty, but can also be linked to a file in the underlying repository.

You would then define the action parameters in the activity specification such that it places its output into the second FLEXMI panel. The platform should take care to do any necessary conversions between formats, assuming that appropriate conversion functions are made available by the tools (for example, the FLEXMI tool has a conversion function from and two XMI).

What we don't currently support yet is actions that produce multiple outputs. I think there is an issue for that already, but @barnettwilliam will correct me if I'm wrong...

agarciadom commented 10 months ago

The main thing is that if you run an EGL transformation, there is no predefined panel to put in the output with an icon that indicates it's generated text. The existing OutputPanel forces you to use a "Problems" icon. We could extend the Epsilon tool to put in a panel definition there, but I think that it's general enough (any M2T transformation would need it) that it should be part of the predefined ones.

(Basically, I need this panel for EGL.)

I'm not looking at showing the results of a M2M transformation in Flexmi format at the moment - my idea was to just show the produced model as a PlantUML diagram, just like what we do already in the Epsilon Playground.

szschaler commented 10 months ago

I see. Would it then make more sense to have a plantUML panel that can show either the text or the diagram and use that? Basically, I'm hesitant about introducing a new centrally hard-coded panel type if we can avoid it as it makes the main platform more complex. Instead, I would prefer having this be supported by an appropriate tool...

barnettwilliam commented 10 months ago

The OutputPanel class has similar functionality to the plantUML panel you describe @szschaler which is derived from ModelPanel.

OutputPanel extends ModelPanel to include support for displaying multiple files.

Perhaps its just a case of being able to override the icons in the activity panel definitions? I think this is something we have talked about but it's not implemented.

Also the diagram display of OutputPanel and ModelPanel isn't working there is an open issue to fix this for YAMTL.

szschaler commented 10 months ago

I see. My bad, I didn't realise that this was exactly the functionality already. How does this fit in with our mechanisms for processing outputs from action functions in a generic manner?

barnettwilliam commented 10 months ago

I don't think the ModelPanel is directly using plant uml for the model to diagram conversion but the playground was using something like kroki service and egl.

The panel id to output the result of a tool function when a button is clicked is specified in the activity's configuration under actions and the class of panel of the output is declared in the activity's config file under panels. The handling is just display the result in the output panel so the panel the result is displayed in must support result's type. Tool services define panels that display specific types e.g. emfatic, flexmi.

There is an issue to add conversion of toolfunction output type to the destination panel which should be similar to the type conversion we do for tool function input parameters. I don't see any difference other than a panel may be able to display multiple types. I need to look into the details of the types and how they are being visualised to understand exactly what is supported by the ModelPanel.

agarciadom commented 10 months ago

Perhaps its just a case of being able to override the icons in the activity panel definitions? I think this is something we have talked about but it's not implemented.

Yes, maybe this would be a better choice, i.e. being able to just change the icon for a given panel.

szschaler commented 10 months ago

This seems to have got stuck. @barnettwilliam, can we please discuss it on Wednesday to decide what to do with it?

barnettwilliam commented 10 months ago

@agarciadom support for panel customisation for activity files has now been added by the fix for #102 by declaring an icon in the panel https://github.com/mdenet/educationplatform/wiki/Creating-an-Activity#panel so you should no longer need to define a new panel type in this case. Could you confirm this resolves your issue?

agarciadom commented 10 months ago

If the argument is that we don't want to have multiple standard OutputPanel panel definitions in the platform when it's possible to just customise the icon, then it would make more sense to call the generic OutputPanel output and not problems (which seems to be a more specific case). In any case, I'm happy to close the PR - I'll resolve this from the Epsilon side.