[geclipse-dev] IE support in g-Eclipse

[Thomas Köckerbauer <tkoeck@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi

As mentioned in the DORII phone conference (I'm CC-ing this to the g-Eclipse 
list), I've been working on the integration of the instrumentation element 
support into g-Eclipse the last few days. I've committed the current version 
the the g-Eclipse CVS repository on the FZK savannah.

The additions to g-Eclipse include:
- Handling of Instrumentation Elements which are listed in the services
  in the Info-System. As you can see in the first image in the attachment
  there is a new subsection "Instrumentation Services" in the Services part
  of the VO subtree of the grid projects in g-Eclipse.
- Opening the Instrumentation Service allows you to browse the instrument
  managers of the specific instrumentation element. Also the current state
  of the instrument manager is displayed. (the [on] and [off] on the
  screenshot)
- You can get additional information about the selected instrument manager by
  having a look in the properties view. Currently this displays the state,
  the attributes and the parameters of the instrument manager.
- Right clicking on one of the instrumentation managers allows you to select
  transactions or commands which should be executed by the instrument manager
  (see screenshot 2).
- If the transaction or the command provide the option to specify parameters
  selecting the command/transaction opens a dialog which asks for those.
  The dialog provides input value validation for the input value restrictions
  specified by the instrument manager. (Not yet fully implemented, also see
  implementation note there) (screenshot 3) (The commands/transactions do not
  yet get executed)

Some notes on the implementation (mainly interesting for people working on the 
IE code):
The plugins (there is one core plugin and one UI plugin) use the already 
existing gridcc code from VCR for accessing the instrumentation element. I 
did some slight modifications:
I only used the classes provided by the package org.gridcc.cogridcc.ie (and 
its subpackages), since they contain everything necessary to access the IE.
I've modified the org.gridcc.cogridcc.ie.utils.ConnectionInfo class to not use 
the org.gridcc.cogridcc.is.Resource class which was only used for one 
constant (Ressouce.NONE) but generated a lot of other dependencies (e.g. 
google api).
I made a slight modification to org.gridcc.cogridcc.ie.utils.CalendarValue in 
getStringValue() to return a more human readable form of the value (btw. it 
would be nice to call getStringValue() from toString() in the Value object).
Maybe we find a way to merge those changes somehow into the existing code so 
that we do not fork here.
The dialog for specifying the the parameters does not support all types of 
values (Value objects) yet, to do this an instrumentation service which has 
parameters of all value types would be useful. As you have seen in screenshot 
3 the dialog had a browse button for selecting the URI using a grid file 
dialog from g-Eclipse (screenshot 4). This is a bit a hack since the browse 
button is added to a parameter if it is of the type string and the name 
contains "URL", maybe it would be useful to add a bit more information to the 
parameters to allow such things without guessing.
I've only tried the service which is running on http (not the one which is 
running on https). Is the https version for signing in with credentials? Did 
you have a look on the httpg protocol which is also used by srm?


Cheers,
Thomas

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