ACME VISUAL EDITOR (VISED) User's Manual

Contents

• Introduction

• Installation

• StartUp 

• Connecting to the Server 

• Creating/Loading an ACME System

• Creating New Components/Connectors

• Viewing Properties

• Viewing ACME Text

• Making and Saving Layouts 

• Viewing Subsystems

• Saving the ACME Description

• Exiting VisEd

• Extending VisEd

Introduction

VisEd is a visual editor for architectural descriptions that allows viewing and manipulation of an architecture specified in the ACME ADL interchange language.  Details on ACME are available from the ACME development team at CMU.

VisEd is basically a small addition to the Graphlet graph layout editor built by Michael Himsolt and the University of Passau.  VisEd can be used as a pure Graphlet platform by simply ignoring the Saam and Morale pull-down menus.  We are indebted to the Graphlet development team for their kind permission to redistribute Graphlet with the VisEd modifications for non-commercial use and research experimentation.  Modifications to the Graphlet package are summarized in the file Readme.gmods.txt in the distribution.

To use VisEd in its ACME role, you must have an ACMEServer available.  ACMEServer is also freely available from the MORALE team and is described here.

Installation

VisEd is available as a binary distribution for both UNIX and Win95/NT.  Graphlet is provided under permission of University of Passau.  Note that in general it is not necessary to have the Graphlet source code, as it is extensible via the included graphscript/tcl/tk interface.  (VisEd was created entirely with the binary distribution).  Graphlet sources are available by contacting the Graphlet team if needed.  Source for the DEComm shared library is available from the ACMEServer source distribution.
Note:  VisEd requires Tcl/Tk8.0p2 or later.  This software is freely available from Scriptics and should be installed prior to VisEd.  (We recommend the binary distribution for ease of use).

Win95/NT:

1.  Download the file visedbin.zip into a temp directory.
2.  Unzip the file into the directory.
3.  Run setup.exe to install the VisEd package.
4.  Add the location: installdir\morale\Graphlet-2.9.5b\bin to your PATH in autoexec.bat

UNIX (Solaris):

1.  Download the file visedbin.tar.gz into the desired install directory.
2.  Unzip the file using "gzip -d visedbin.tar"
3.  Untar the file using "tar -xvf visedbin.tar"
4.  Add the location: installdir/morale/Graphlet-2.9 .5b/bin to your path.

Start Up

To start up VisEd, simply type graphlet from the command line of your operating system.  This will bring up the Graphlet graph layout editor.  To use Graphlet in its pure form, simply ignore the Morale and Saam pull-down menus.

Graphlet starts in default Create mode.  In this mode, left-clicking in the drawing area creates a new node which can then be labelled and manipulated.  NOTE:  Nodes created before connecting to ACMEServer will NOT be added to the architectural representation.  Clicking the arrow icon on the left side places you in layout mode.  Left-clicking in the drawing area has no effect when in layout mode.  You can click and select a node and drag it around the screen to adjust layouts to a desired look.  If you select a node while still in Create mode, and try to drag it, you will instead begin to create an edge between 2 nodes.

Additional information on using Graphlet in its native mode can be obtained from the integral Graphlet help or the Graphlet home page. The remainder of this manual highlights operation of Graphlet in VisEd mode. A tutorial for VisEd can be viewed here.

Connecting to the Server

The first step in putting Graphlet into VisEd mode is connection to the ACME Server. To connect to an ACME Server, there must first be a server running and awaiting connection.  For instructions on this step, see the ACME Server user's manual. 

Select the Morale pull-down menu and select the Connect to ACME.... item.  This will bring up a dialog box for entry of the hostname where the server is running and the port on which the server is listening for connections.  The default ACMEServer port is 9999, however you should use whatever value was given in the server configuration file used on server startup.

If the connection is successful, you should get a confirmation dialog denoting ACME_SUCCESS. If the connection fails, ensure that the acmeserver is currently running as a valid process. Click on OK to clear the dialog.

Creating/Loading an ACME Description

You now have two choices to begin work, you may load an existing ACME description or you may create a new ACME description.

To load an existing ACME description, use the Morale pull-down menu and select Open ACME Description ... This will bring up the file selection dialog box. Select the file to be opened and then click the Open button. At this point VisEd will file transfer the ACME text description to the server. This may take a few seconds but when completed a success dialog will appear. The Title bar of the application will change to VisEd and contain the top level System name of the ACME description. Click OK to clear the success dialog. If the ACME file had a layout property, then the system will appear layed out on the display canvas, otherwise it will be concentrated in the upper left corner of the canvas. Use the Layout pull-down menu to select an appropriate layout algorithm to display the architecture on the canvas.

To create a new ACME system description, select the Morale pull-down menu item New ACME Description.... This will bring up a dialog to allow entry of the top-level system name for this description. There is also a type selection list box. This is used if an ACME Family with system types has previously been defined. In general there is only one entry None. Click on None and then OK after entering a system name.

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