Workflow and the operation manager

One topic of today’s meeting, besides progress on SMTK’s new operation panel, was how workflows would affect the presentation of operations from the operation manager.

Workflow configuration

We discussed having the workflow serve as an intermediary between the operation manager (i.e., leaving the operations untouched in the manager) and having the workflow modify operations in the manager. The consensus was that hiding or exposing existing operators would be done outside of the operation manager but that the workflow may at some point create duplicates of existing operations as a means of changing the presentation of an operation.

We decided that we want to support the following eventually but not all immediately:

  • Whitelist all operations in a plugin (no renaming allowed)
  • Also whitelist operations by their name (not the label given in the operator’s attribute)
    • may rename operation and its items
    • override default values (and default values of items)
    • override view (including which items should appear and what widgets represent them)
  • Task definitions
    • Also want to grant tasks the capability to modify the whitelist for the duration of their activity.