but possible only for the iterator -> iterator case
Since we can not "probe" a generic lambda, we get only one shot:
we can try to bind it into a std::function with the assumed signature
...since all those metaprogramming techniques rely on SFINAE,
but *instantiating* a template means to compile it, which is more
than just substituate a type into the signature
If forming the signature fails -> SFINAE, try next one
If instantiating a template fails -> compile error, abort
Basically we want to support two distinct cases, just by slightly adapting
the invocation of the expansion functor:
Case-1: classical monadic flatMap:
the Functor accepts a value yielded by the source iterator
and builds a new "expaneded" iterator
Case-2: manipulation of opaque implementation state
the Functor knows internal details of the source iterator
and thus takes the source iterator as such as argument,
performs some manipulation and then builds a new sub-iterator
A soulution to reconcile those two distinct cases can be built
with the help of a generic lambda
Here, the tricky question remains, how to relate this evalutaion scheme
to the well known monadic handling of collections and iterators.
It seems, we can not yet decide upon that question, rather we should
first try to build a concrete implementation of the envisioned algorithm
and then reconsider the question later, to what extent this is "monadic"
This can be seen as a side track, but the hope is
by relying on some kind of monadic evaluation pattern, we'll be
able to to reconcile the IterExplorer draft from 2012 with the requirement
to keep the implementation of "tree position" entirely opaque.
The latter is mandatory in the use case here, since we must not intermingle
the algorithm to resolve UI-coordinates in any way with the code actually
navigating and accessing GTK widgets. Thus, we're forced to build some kind
of abstraction barrier, and this turns out to be surprisingly difficult.
...which was deliberately represented in an asymmetric way, to verify the
design's ability to cope with such implementation intricacies. So basically
we have to kick in at LEVEL == 1 and access the implementation differently.
This exercise just shows again, that treating tree structures recursively
is the way to go, and we should do similar when coding up the query-API
for the real GTK toolkit based window elements...
...which can be helpful when a function usually returns a somewhat dressed-up iterator,
but needs to return a specific fixed value under some circumstances
this fixes a silly mistake:
obviously we want named sub-nodes, aka. "Attributes",
but we used the anonymous sub-nodes instead, aka. "Children"
Incidentally, this renders the definitions also way more readable;
in fact the strange post-fix naming notation of the original version
was a clear indication of using the system backwards....
obviously, we get a trivial case, when the path is explicit,
and we need a tricky full blown resolution with backtracking
when forced to interpolate wildcards to cover a given UICoord
spec against the actual UI topology.
Do we need it?
* actually not right now
* but already a complete implementation of the ViewSpec concept
requires such a resolution
...to limit them to the UI-Coordinates themselves,
while declining the possibility to mutate the target environment
through the PathResolver. Better handle changes within the
target environment by dedicated API calls on the target elements,
instead of creating some kind of "universal structure"
..this collection of ideas, terms and conclusions has been shaped
since some time within the TiddlyWiki. Since I've now started even
some supporting implementation regarding these concepts, its time
to publish them in the design documentation section of the Website
After completing the self-contained UICoord data elements,
the next thing to consider might be how to resolve UI coordinates
against an actual window topology. We need to define a suitable
command-and-query interface in order to build and verify this
intricate resolution process separated from the actual UI code.
exploring the idea of a configuration DSL.
As a first step, this could be a simple internal DSL,
implemented as a bunch of static functor objects, which are internally bound
and thus implemented by the ViewLocator within InteractionDirector
...we have to face the problem that we need some generic strategy
for access to component views, which possibly will become customisable.
And the allowed patterns of access are quite different for the various
kind of view we know....
responsible for access and allocation of component views.
Internally wired to the PanelLocator within the global WindowLocator
This setup settles those nasty qeustions of crosswise top-level access
this starts work on a new UI global topic (#1004)
- coin a new term: "view component"
- distinction between veiw component and Panel
- consider how to locate view components
- WindowList becomes WindowLocator
actually I do not know much regarding the actual situation when,
within the Builder run, we're able to detect a change and generate
a diff description. However, as a first step, I'll pick IterSrouce
as a base interface and use a "generation context", which is to be
passed by shared-ptr
the (trivial) implementation turned out to be correct as written,
but it was (again) damn challenging to get the mulithreaded chaotic
test fixture and especially the lambda captures to work correct.
- concept for a first preliminary implementation of dispatch into the UI thread
- define an integration effort to build a complete working communication chain
This change was caused by investigation of UI event loop dispatch;
since the GTK UI is designed to run single threaded, any invocation
from other threads need to be diepatched explicitly.
A possible way to achieve this is to use Glib::Dispatcher, which
in turn requires that the current thread (which is in this case the UI thread)
already holds a Glib::MainContext
This prompted me to create a tight link between the external facade interfaces
of the UI and the event loop itself. What remains to be settled is how
to hand over arguments to the action in the main loop
After investigation of current GTK and GIO code, I came to the conclusion
that we do *not* want to rely on the shiny new Gtk::Application, which
provides a lot of additional "convenience" functionality we do neither
need nor want. Most notably, we do not want extended desktop integration
like automatically connecting to D-Bus or exposing application actions
as desktop events.
After stripping away all those optional functions and extensions, it turns
out the basic code to operate the GTK main event loop is quite simple.
This changeset extracts this code from the (deprecated) Gtk::Main and
integrates it directly in Lumiera's UI framework object (UiManager).
this is just a tiny change to make things more othogonal.
Now the unwinding and calls to any GTK / Widget dtors happen *after*
emitting the term signal from UI shutdown. Which means, the other subsystems
are shutting down (in their dedicated threads) as well, thus lowering
the probability of some action still using the UI and triggering an exception
as it turned out, the former functionality was deactivated in 2009
with changeset 6151415
The whole concept seems to be unfinished, and needs to be reworked
and integrated with "Views and Perspectives" (whatever that is...)
See also #1097
Gtk::Main is deprecated, but the new solution, instantiating a
Gtk::Application object does not match our use case, since we handle
all application concerns already and just need a Gtk main loop to run.
Anyway, it became clear that the "main object" will be the new UiManager.
As a first step, I've now moved the (deprecated) Gtk::Main object
down there. Next step (planned) will be to inherit from Gio::Application
and clone some functionality from Gtk::Application
...which opens more questions than it solves at the moment.
Especially note #1096, the question how to refer to object-IDs
Maybe we need to enable sending EntryIDs via GenNode?
Anyway, the magic spell is broken now: we have a way how to
establish commands and how to issue them from the UI, with full integration
of UI-Bus, layer separation facade, instance management and ProcDispatcher
Looks like a stepping stone
after extended analysis, it turned out to be a "placeholder concept"
and introduces an indirection, which can be removed altogether
- simple command invocation happens at gui::model::Tangible
- it is based on the command (definition) ID
- instance management happens automatically and transparently
- the extended case of context-bound commands will be treated later,
and is entirely self-contained
while the initial design treated the commands in a strictly top-down manner,
where the ID is known solely to the CommandRegistry, this change and information
duplication became necessary now, since by default we now always enqueue and
dispatch anonymous clone copies from the original command definition (prototype).
This implementation uses the trick to tag this command-ID when a command-hanlde
is activated, which is also the moment when it is tracked in the registry.
in accordance to the design changes concluded yesterday.
- in the standard cases we now check the global registry first
- automatically create anonymous clone copy from global commands
- reorganise code internally to use common tail implementation
as it turns out, we can always trigger commands right away,
the moment all arguments are known. Thus it is sufficient to
send a single argument binding message, which allows us to
get rid of a lot or ugly complexities (payload visitor).
It seems more adequate to push the somewhat intricate mechanics
for the "fall back" onto generic commands down into the implementation
level of CommandInstanceManager. The point is, we know the standard
usage situation is to rely on the instance manager, and thus we want
to avoid redundant table lookups, only to support the rare case of
fallback to global commands. The latter is currently used only from
unit-tests, but might in future also be used by scripts.
Due to thread safety considerations, I have refrained from handing
out a direct reference to the command token sitting in the registry,
even while not doing so incurs a small runtime penalty (accessing
the shared ref-count for creating a copy of the smart-handle).
This is the typical situation where you'd be tempted to sacrifice
sanity for the sake of an imaginary performance benefit, which
in fact is dwarfed by all the machinery of UI-Bus and argument
passing via GenNode.
but I am not happy with the implementation yet: the maybeGet just
doesn't feel right. Likely it will be a better idea to push that
fallback mechanism generally down into the CommandInstanceManager?
just by reasoning from the concept, an instance should always correspond
to a single invocation trail. Having several sets of invocation state
compete with each other, means to keep them distinct, otherwise the
implicit state is going to be corrupted
This changeset fixes a huge pile of problems, as indicated in the
error log of the Doxygen run after merging all the recent Doxygen improvements
unfortunately, auto-linking does still not work at various places.
There is no clear indication what might be the problem.
Possibly the rather unstable Sqlite support in this Doxygen version
is the cause. Anyway, needs to be investigated further.
this is indeed a change of concept.
A 'command instance' can not be found through the official
Command front-end anymore, since we do not create a registration.
This allows us to avoid decorating command IDs with running counters
interesting new twist: we do not even need to decorate with a running number,
since we'll get away with an anonymous command instance, thanks to Command
being a smart-handle
this is a prerequisite for command instance management:
We have now an (almost) complete framework for writing actual
command definitions in practice, which will be registered automatically.
This could be complemented (future work) by a script in the build process
to regenerate proc/cmd.hpp based on the IDs of those automatic definitions.
The point in question is how to manage these definitions in practice,
since we're about to create a huge lot of them eventually. The solution
attempted here is heavily inspired by the boost-test framework
...because this topic serves as a vehicle to elaborate various core concepts
of the UI backbone, especially how to access, bind and invoke Proc-Layer commands
...turns out to be a nasty subject, now we're able to see
in more concrete detail how this interaction needs to be carried out.
Basically this is a blocker for the top-level, since it is obviously
some service in top-level, which ultimately becomes responsible for
orchestrating this activity
this pretty much resolves most of the uncertainities:
we now get a set of mutually dependent services, each of which
is aware of each other member's capabilities, but accesses those
only through this partner's API
After quite some pondering, it occured to me that we both
- need some top-level model::Tangible to correspond to the RootMO in the session
- need some Controller to handle globally relevant actions
- need a way to link action invocation to transient interaction state (like focus)
This leads to the introduction of a new top-level controller, which is better
suited to fill that role than the depreacted model-controller or the demoted window-manager
looks like we're in management business here ;-)
we chop off heads, slaughter the holy cows and then install -- a new manager
...allows us to get rid of a lot of sigc boilerplate syntax.
The downside is that the resulting functors are not sigc::trackable.
This seems adequate here, since the whole top-level UI backbone is
maintained by GtkLumiera, and thus ensured to exist as long as the
main GTK event loop is running.
WARNING: beware of creating "wild" background thrads in the UI, without
proper scheduling of any communication via the event loop!
This is a very pervasive change and basically turns the whole top-level
of the GTK-UI bottom-up. If this change turns out right, it would likely
solve #1048
WARNING: in parts not implemented, breaks UI
...which itself is obsolete and needs to be redesigned from scratch.
For now we create a local instance of this obsolete PlaybackController
in each viewer panel and we use a static accessor function to just some
instance. Which would break if we start playback with multiple viewer
panels. But we can't anyway, since the Player itself is also a broken
leftover from an obsoleted design study from the early days.
so why care...
- WindowList (ex WindowManager)
- Project & Controller
the latter ones are defunct and can be replicated down into each
of the old timeline pannel instances. They just serve the purpose
to keep this old code barely functional, so it can be used as reference
for building the new timeline
There seems to be a mismatch in the arrangement of the top-level entities
* we support multiple windows, yet from reading the code, you'd ge the impression we aren't really aware we have multiple top-level windows
* the `WindowManager` is the core UI manager, which feels like a mix-up in concerns
* the `WorkspaceWindow::createUI()` does the global UI initialisation. Again, we have multiple workspace windows.
* `GtkLumiera::main()` creates a `Model` and a `Controller` in local function scope, but stores the `WindowManager` in an object field.
* it seems, for that very reason, `GtlLumiera` needed to be a singleton, to allow by-name access to "the" `WindowManager`
* needless to say, this causes a host of problems when shutting down the UI.
The idea is to introduce a dedicated UiManager, to deal with the central
framework induced concerns solely, and to demote the WindowManager and the
WorkspaceWindows to care only for their local concerns
in fact it just does not fulfil any of the behavioural properties
of a full-fledged UI-Element. All it needs is an uplink bus connection,
so let's just keep it as that
Sidenote: I've realised today that such a "free standing" BusTerm
without registration in Nexus is a good idea and acceptable solution.
yes, it's a cycle and indeed quite tricky.
Just verified it (again) with the debugger and saw all
dtor calls happening in the expected order. Also the number
of Nexus registration is sane
Now I've realised that there are two degrees of connectedness.
It is very much possible to have a "free standing" BusTerm, which
only allows to send uplink messages. In fact, this is how CoreService
is implemented, and probably it should also the way how to connect
the GuiNotification service...
Reason was some insideous detail regarding Lambdas:
When a Lambda captures context, a *closure* is created.
And while the Lambda itself is generated code, pretty much
like an anonymous function, the closure depends on the context
that was captured. In our case here, the Lambda used to start
the thread was the problem: it captured the termCallback functor
from the argument of the enclosing function. In fact it did not
help or change anything if we successively package that lambda
into a function objet and store this by value, because the
lambda still refers to the transient function context present
on stack at the moment it was captured.
The solution is to revert back to a bind expression, since this
creates a dedicated storage for the bound function arguments
managed within the bind-functor. This makes us independent
from the call context
