TMF must open several "trace" types, some of which are stored in directories and others as almost arbitrary text files. Thus, it does not fit too well with the usual file open dialog pattern. Yet, we often feel that TMF does not just open the file as it should... Here is a proposed "algorithm" to open files. Comments / use cases welcome.
The TMF hack-a-thon yesterday was very interesting. Around 18 persons participated from Ericsson, EfficiOS, Google, Polytechnique and Concordia University. Various topics were discussed (some at high level, others at very detailed level) and worked on. Topics included state history tree and control flow view drawing optimizations, remote control, new views, statistics, critical path analysis, drawing the control flow view before the state history was fully computed. We may hear about some of these in separate messages.
On the "Open" dialog topic, it was a good opportunity to better see the objectives, constraints and current status.
Trace files are not easily identified. Text file "logs" do not have a special extension or magic number; you know it is one when the regular expressions match. You have almost no other choice than let the user select any file and tell you the type. CTF traces come as one or several traces in a hierarchy of directories with the leaf directories containing one trace (one metadata file, one index subdirectory and several channel files). A typical case is to have a session directory with one kernel trace and one or more ust traces. However, you can have a collection of traces, consisting of many session directories, and this recursively. You are in a trace collection when there are only subdirectories until you arrive at the last level and there is a metadata file.
My proposal needed some smart at each level: in the presence of a CTF trace collection, put an icon and allow to either select the subdirectory and open it with the button (open the collection), or descend into the subdirectory to select a trace in the collection by double clicking. This does not appear to be available with the Eclipse file dialogs, since they rely on the platform specific dialogs. It explains the current setup in the TMF rich client platform (RCP) with the possibly confusing "open file" versus "open directory".
If any of you knows a way to get proper hooks in the Eclipse file dialog which would allow to specify the files to show, show with an icon, allow to open or to descend into... this would provide a good solution. Otherwise, we need to either rework the menu to make the common case more straightforward (with possibly different audiences with different common cases), or to implement a trace open dialog which is not a standard file open dialog.
