Loading and Manipulating an Existing ACME Representation

Before beginning this lesson, you should already have launched Graphlet and connected to the ACME server as described in the introduction.

Opening an Existing ACME Description

The first step to doing any useful work is to load or create an ACME Description. This tutorial will look at loading an existing ACME representation. Use Morale->Open ACME Description.. to bring the file selection dialog:

In the Graphlet install directory, there is an example ACME file from the ACME Lib distribution called "existing.acme". Click on the filename (exising) and then on Open. VisEd then transfers the local file to the server and asks the server to open it. ACME Server then uses the ACME Lib parser to parse and open the file. After this procedure you should see the success dialog:

If you get a Failure dialog, it may be caused by any of the following errors:

• The file was not properly transferred to the server. Check the ACME Server repository and verify that your file was transferred.
• The file could not be opened. This might be caused by the server being improperly configured. Be sure the server configuration is correct and has write permissions into the repository directory.
• The file had ACME Syntax Errors. Look at the Server Log and the parser errors will be listed.

After Opening the File, You see a screen similar to this:

Changing the Layout

Note that all the ACME elements are concentrated in the upper left corner. This is normal when there is no Layout file associated with this representation. The title bar changes from Graphlet to VisEd and lists the system name associated with this editor window. Now put VisEd into Layout Mode (press the second button from the top on the left vertical button column [the one with the arrow]).

Now use the Layout->DAG selection to lay the architecture out as a directed acyclic graph. The editor should now look like this:

When the architectural representation is too big for the canvas, you may do several things to help:

• Resize the window by using the mouse on the bottom right corner of the editor window to drag it to the desired size.
• Use the Maximize button to fill the available screen space with the Graphlet editor.
• Use the scroll bars to move the image around in the window.
• Use Graphlets built-in scaling capability under the View pull-down menu.

For the tutorial, select View->66% and you should see the entire DAG in the window. Although this autolayout algorithm does a good job at arranging the components, it is not perfect. There are still some line crossings and overlapping components. There are several ways to tweak the display to get what you want.

First lets look at user control of the layout algorithm parameters. Activate the Options pull-down menu by clicking on it in the menu bar. Now move the mouse pointer over Layout and you will see a list of user-controllable algorithms. Select DAG (Options->Layout->DAG). You will see the Layout modification window as below:

You can now try modifications to see the effects. For instance we have some component overlap, so lets change the horizontal distance parameter. Move the horizontal distance slider to the right until it reads about 100 and press the Apply button. You should see the components move further apart. You can modify other options if desired. You can always return back to the starting position by pressing Reset and then Apply. Press OK to clear the dialog.

Sometimes the algorithm just can't get the look you want. Graphlet allows you to manually move individual components around on the screen. Ensure you are still in Layout mode and move the mouse pointer over one of the components that overlaps another (like BackupDECSafe). Press and hold the left mouse button and drag the mouse over the canvas. Note the component moves around and maintains all its connections. If there are bends in the diagram you want removed, use the Options->Graph->Allow Bends check item to remove the option for bends from the layout algorithm.

[Previous] [Users Manual] [Next]