Instance File Editing: Ideas for Improvements

FESA instance files contain the device configuration per FEC. For power supply FESA software these files can be very huge and confusing. In many cases the device configuration is similar, but is spread over several files.

Instance files can be created per FEC in FESA. At the moment (12/16) it is not possible to generate instance files from information in the FESA database @GSI. Therefore more convenient possibilities to work with instance files are desired.

Improvements are possible with a graphical approach and/or using a "compressed" format for displaying/editing device instance information.

Ideas and Drafts

Graphical Approach

The idea is to display the relevant information (the device-instance configuration) from multiple instance files per deploy-unit in a table. The content of the table is supposed to be similar to the table editor for single instance files. The difference is that the information displayed is originating from multiple instance files. The original order of the rows is per FEC, but an idea is to allow different sorting, e.g. by timing zone, by accelerator zone, ... .

With the free GUI sketching tool "Pencil" a simple draft for a graphical table editor was created:

The table itself is a standard element from the GUI sketch tool. In the real version the table should not have checkboxes in the first row and it should have more columns for the device configuration.

The dialog to select device-instances for copy/paste operations could look similar to this:

Feature Wishlist

• Sorting/Filtering not only by FEC names, but also by device names, timing zones, accelerator, accelerator zone
• ? Dragging and dropping of rows to visualize two rows below each other?
• If changes are persisted from within the multiple file editor the adapted instance files should be marked, e.g. by a coloured spot on the file icon in the project explorer
• Display of additional, useful information on mouse hover over cells?

Compressed Format

Idea by UK: shorter notation, avoiding duplicates (e.g. in case of status information, events-mapping, ...) by using references, textual

• Realization in parallel to graphical approach
• Display of additional, useful information on mouse hover over references

-- SolveighMatthies - 20 Dec 2016