Graphical Programming TODO list

General

JGraph

• Fix selection bug in JGraph where deselections are reported wrong to listeners. The workaround is in JGraphView.selectionListener.
• Fix GraphLayoutCache.getCells(). Corrected version is in MyGraphLayoutCache.

• JGraph could be reworked to make everything an attribute: parent cells, link connections, etc. Also, all the magic inside JGraph could be made into layers, so everything is controlled in a unified way.

ProgramPlugin

• View plugin handing is unimplemented. I'd like to have multiple views supported, with a GUI to select them and open them in new windows and such. Example: A tree-based view for browsing everything.

View

• Moving functions into or out of a View's scope is not handled properly. This isn't needed at present, though.

JGraphView

Bugs

• Edges cannot be selected inside UserFunctions^?.
• Empty groups disappear permanently. Particularly the root group, which is problematic. Something in JGraph is doing this, but I haven't found it yet.
• Not all ports can be selected. Cause unknown.
• Sugiyama layout does not handle cyclic links. Instead, it gives up and moves everything to the origin.
• Grouping operations inside UserFunctions^? cause problems.
• Animation sometimes slows down. It doesn't move linearly over time, and takes too long.
• Marquee selection only works on edges. Should work on Functions.
• Ungrouping can cause name collisions. Particularly, a group with the same-named function inside cannot be ungrouped directly.
• Manual layout doesn't work. And there's really no facility for doing this properly, since manual dragging doesn't get propagated back into the attribute stack.

Badly-implemented features

• JGraph cannot handle creating new cells inside hidden ones. This is what happens when you create a UserFunction^?, which is initially collapsed. Since I couldn't figure out another way around it, nor an easy way to fix it, I opted to delete things entirely when they get moved inside, and not create them when they should appear inside. This needs to be fixed somehow, so that UserFunctions^? can be expanded and collapsed like groups.
• Too many updates occur. This causes the GUI to work slower than necessary.
• Too slow to have HighlightUpdatingFunctions on by default. Either make this faster at processing updates, or find a way to coalesce update requests pending during an update, or both.
• Special UserFunction^? handling shouldn't be in JGraphView. Input/output deletion, etc.
• Sugiyama layout should compact functions more. Functions without input connections are all on the left, when they needn't be so far away.
• Animation of group collapsing is discontinuous. Should start from pre-collapsed size rather than origin.

Unimplemented features

• Link routing is absent. Lines shouldn't overlap functions.
• Positioning/ordering of control panels is unimplemented. There should be a way of specifying which control panels go on which side and in which order.
• The categorization of Actions is unimplemented. If there get to be a lot of actions, a submenu system like for Options may be required.
• There is no way to specify the offset of a custom view within the cell view. See getCustomViewBounds(). This would be needed if different CellViews were used.
• quickEdit() is unimplemented. See Javadoc comment.
• Attribute layers could have declared input attributes. This would allow optimization of the update() method, since only the necessary layers must be called.

Plugins

DirectionalEndpointsRouting

• Links inside UserFunctions^? going to input/outputs near corners go the wrong way due to being too close to the edge.

-- TimPeterson - 09 Aug 2006