Extending VisEd

VisEd can be extended by using Tcl/Tk and Graphscript. Details of using Graphscript can be found in the Graphscript programmers manual on the Graphlet web site.

To add your own functionality, follow the following steps:

First, plan and create a top-level menu item and use Graphscript to enter it into the menubar. For instance, if you want a toplevel menu named MyNewMenu you would follow the following steps:

• Create a tcl file for your code (i.e. MyNewCode.tcl )
• Open the file morale.init.tcl and add the line source MyNewCode.tcl in the upper portion of the file (labelled Place all Morale source imports here) with the other source statements.
• Go to the bottom of the file (labelled Global startup commands go here).
  • In this section there are several subsections.
    • In the first subsection, place your top level menu item with the statement lappend GT(menubar) MyNewMenu
    • The second section is only if you want to add something to the context menu
    • The next several sections are to set up the sub menu items in your Menu and connect them to the call-back routines. For each menu item, add a statement of the form:

      lappend GT_menu(MyNewMenu,create_procs) GT_create_someProcedureName1

    • In the last portion of the file is the load commands for any shared libraries (such as the DEComm package) that are needed by your program.
  • Save this file, but keep it handy for reference. You will need to match your call-back names to proc names in your other file.
• Now start on your file MyNewCode.tcl. For each menu item you will need to create a couple of procs (need to match the signatures:
  • First hook up your menu call-back to the menu item. The important thing is to make sure your action names stay consistent. The graphscript manual contains a discussion of action tables if you need more info

  proc GT_create_someProcedureName1 {editor menu} {
      global GT
     set GT(action,some_actionName1) GT_action_someActionName1 
     GT::add_menu_command $editor $menu {
              "My Menu Item1 ..." someactionName1
     }
  }

  • Now you simply need to write the action code with a proc like:

  proc GT_action_someActionName1 {editor} {
    global  GT 
    set graph GT($editor,graph)
    #more action stuff here
  }

• Some useful globals:
  • MessageTypes(x) where x is an all caps name from messages.h. Useful for sending messages to an ACME Server
  • SystemNames($editor) where $editor represents the current editor ID. Gives you the ACME system name of the system being drawn in this window.
  • IsConnected is true if the app is connected to an ACME Server.
  • Parents($editor) where $editor represents the current editor ID. Provides the name of the parent system of the ACME representation in the current editor window. This is NULL if you are in the top-level display.
  • GT(X,Y) provides a wealth of access to nodes, graphs, editors, etc, See the graphscript manual for more details.