Progress on the task subsystem

[dcthomp]

Some more progress:

• Nodes vary in width so the task title can be shown with a color swatch showing the task status to the left (also in the tool-tip):
  
  
• Nodes that are unavailable may be dragged but the tool-button title cannot be triggered, so they cannot be marked active.
• Nodes that are incomplete or better do expose a menu at the right of their title:
  
  
  
  Note that in the screenshot above – because “Load a model and attribute” is incomplete – the task cannot be marked completed.
• Marking a task complete is possible from the GUI.
• Switching the active task is possible from the GUI.

Finally, here’s a simplified wind-tunnel example from John.

Remaining Work

There’s still a lot left to do. Here are some suggestions if people want to work on things related to tasks:

• @aron.helser Add reactions (especially setting the active view in the attribute editor) when switching active tasks. Hints for implementing:
  • Add a styles() method to smtk::task::Manager that returns a JSON object like the example here.
  • Have the attribute editor panel observe the project manager. When a project is available, have it observe the “active” task on project’s task-manager (see smtk::task::Active::Observers).
  • When the active task changes, examine the new task’s styles and, if any has an attribute-editor entry, parse that to discover a view name.
• Lay out nodes automatically.
• @johnt Save/restore user-edited node layout.
  • The placement of tasks in the task-panel exists only in the Qt layer (each qtTaskNode has a position and is held by the qtTaskScene, in turn held by a qtTaskEditor, in turn held by a pqSMTKTaskPanel). Either we need to move node placement to be part of the smtk::task::Task instance or we need an API with no Qt dependencies to query where nodes are placed in a view. Hints for implementing:
  • The most expedient solution is simply to add ivars to smtk::task::Task and have qtTaskNode set these each time its layout is changed. Then, smtk/task/json/jsonTask.cxx could include the nodal locations in its own serialization (and deserialize as needed).
  • Beyond that, the automatic layout that currently occurs when a new project becomes active in the task panel would need to be omitted if nodal locations already exist.
• Provide some UI for GatherResources that lets users select from among a project’s resources. Hints for implementing:
  • Create a new qtGatherResources which inherits qtBaseView.
  • Register the class with the smtk::view::Manager’s viewWidgetFactory.
  • Extend qtTaskNode to create a view widget for its “contents” and display it inside the m_controls groupBox (this group box is declared in smtk/extension/qt/task/TaskNode.ui).
  • This should probably be done after the “Add reactions…” item above since the name of the view configuration for a task node should be part of the task’s style.
• Fix a bug that prevents task adaptors from running properly (UUIDs of gathered resources are not communicated to other tasks).
• Handle groups of tasks more gracefully. (Choose a layout strategy.)
• Streamline interactions with task-nodes for usability (e.g., click or double-click task title button to activate without using a pop-up menu; click a task status “completable” swatch to mark completed). Implementation hints:
  • Decide on a set of improved interactions. Suggestions include
    • Clicking on the task title should make it active if possible.
    • Clicking on the task status swatch should mark it completed/completable if it was completable/completed to begin with. (Other states should have no effect.)
    • When a task becomes active, if it has a node-view style, the m_controls widget should be shown. When a task is no longer active, its m_controls widget should be hidden (i.e., always auto-expand the active task and auto-collapse inactive ones). This does not prevent users from re-expanding nodes later.
    • Hovering over a task should display a tool-tip with the task’s status followed by its brief description.
    • A task should have some affordance to show a complete description to users.
  • Decide whether to stick with Qt widgets embedded in a QGraphicsItem or to subclass a QGraphicsItem that draws the title, state-swatch, drag-handle, and context-menu button. The latter seems like more maintenance but with more intuitive interaction.
• Implement resource schemas (i.e., renaming the attribute resource’s template and templateVersion methods to schema and schemaVersion respectively, then moving them up to smtk::resource::Resource). By making resource schemas a “thing,” we can put task definitions in objects that are progenitors to resources.