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Posted to dev@taverna.apache.org by Stian Soiland-Reyes <st...@apache.org> on 2016/06/08 17:01:30 UTC
[CWL] Show CWLTool contextual view in Service Details?

We had a call with Thilina, Michael and myself.

We discussed the progress with CWL-browse so far, which is slightly
ahead the plan:

Blog: http://maanadevgsoc2016.blogspot.co.uk/

Merged pull request:
https://github.com/apache/incubator-taverna-common-activities/pull/4


So the CWL "description" field is now shown within the Available
Services, but of course it's not much space with about 40 characters
shown on a single line, per tool - but many CWL tools might have quite
long descriptions, e.g.

https://github.com/common-workflow-language/workflows/blob/master/tools/ucsc-liftOver.cwl#L7

In addition parameters in CWL can have a label, description and a
format - even if we don't check the format it is useful information to
present.


So perhaps we should add a Service Detail panel for CWL that includes
this after a CWL Tool has been added to the workflow?


This is called a Contextual View - in the Taverna 2 plugin tutorial see:

http://dev.mygrid.org.uk/wiki/display/developer/4.+Viewing+service+details

The tutorial adds a basic JPanel.  You can try this first with some
simple JLabels, but it can take forever to figure out a good layout
here (that also fit in the constrained space of the Service Detail
panel).


For an example, here's how the WSDL activity contextual view for 2.5 looks:

https://github.com/apache/incubator-taverna-workbench-common-activities/blob/old/wsdl-activity-ui-1.5/src/main/java/net/sf/taverna/t2/activities/wsdl/views/WSDLActivityContextualView.java

Here it uses a <html>-based JLabel - note that it's not proper HTML,
but it can support some basic text formatting (but not hyperlinks!),
and more importantly, handles line-wrapping and things like that as
you would generally expect.

(But you might have to do some simple Markdown-like conversion of the
CWL description, e.g. so \n\n is shown as a <p> -- I don't think any
particular format has been specified)


The nitty-gritty details where it describes each port:

https://github.com/apache/incubator-taverna-workbench-common-activities/blob/old/wsdl-activity-ui-1.5/src/main/java/net/sf/taverna/t2/activities/wsdl/views/AbstractXMLSplitterActionView.java


In that example it extracts "descriptor.getDocumentation()" which is
parsed from the WSDL file. You would need a similar way to pass along
the descriptions in your beans.



The equivalent code for Taverna 3 is not very different, except how it
get holds of its getActivity():

https://github.com/apache/incubator-taverna-workbench-common-activities/tree/master/taverna-wsdl-activity-ui/src/main/java/org/apache/taverna/activities/wsdl/views




-- 
Stian Soiland-Reyes
Apache Taverna (incubating), Apache Commons
http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9842-9718