Re: BOY detached opi remains in front of its parent

[Paul Sichta <psichta@pppl.gov>]

Kay,

Please send me  that screenshot (link?).

On behalf of our operators,  we thank you and your team for the Phoebus endeavor; we may yet be able to retain our independent/scalable/arrange-able medm-like window management (well, much improved).  At our facility, the runtime display manager will be the most useful application.

Kind regards,

-ps

On Fri, Dec 1, 2017 at 7:57 AM, Kasemir, Kay <kasemirk@ornl.gov> wrote:

Fellow tech-talkians,

This email mentions a screenshot.
It's too large for the mailing list.
If you care, let me know so I'll email it to you.

-Kay

________________________________________
From: Kasemir, Kay
Sent: Friday, December 01, 2017 7:53 AM
To: Lussignol Yves; tech-talk@aps.anl.gov
Subject: Re: BOY detached opi remains in front of its parent

Hi:

> To open an opi from another one with an action button, I use the action "Open OPI" in "Detached Tab"  mode. But in this mode the child opi is always in front of its parent. The mode "New workbench" works well but generates a > lot of icons in the task bar. The mode "Standalone window" should probably be more convenient if only it worked (see error messages in attached file).
>..
> - Could it be possible to have the parent OPI in front of its child in "Detached Tab"  mode ?
> - Could you fix the problem with the "Standalone window" mode ?

In short: No.
The parent/child ordering of windows as well as the task bar and other fluff is a result of CS-Studio currently being based on Eclipse.
We can't do much about it.
.. except open totally "standalone" windows, which are plain SWT 'Shell' windows, where you then have no control: Cannot re-attach them, cannot restore their location on restart etc.

Longer answer:
Last summer, several CS-Studio developers fundamentally reconsidered the long term future of CS-Studio and decided that it'd be useful to move CS-Studio off Eclipse.
Eclipse has served us very well for the last 10 years, but we're beginning to feel limitations.
The 'phoebus' project was started to evaluate our options, see http://phoebus-doc.readthedocs.io/en/latest/intro.html
You'll find "Full control of window placement free from RCP restrictions" listed as one of the key motivations.

In Phoebus we have full control over the window management.
As shown in the attached screenshot, in the phoebus framework we have the basic Web-browser idea:
A window can have multiple tabs. You can detach tabs into new windows, or move tabs between windows.
You can move windows in front of or behind each other.
If a window has only one tab, you can decide to hide them so you then get a very basic window with just one panel inside, minimal fluff.
The framework still remembers the layout, so on restart you get the same window locations with the same tabs back that you had when you closed the application.
.. or you could decide to make a "golden" layout read-only, so you'll always get that layout on restart.

Again, the idea started this summer. At this time, the project is still under heavy development.
It currently includes the PV Tree, PV Table, Probe, most of the Display Builder runtime and editor.
It's 100% compatible with the PV Table and Display Builder configuration files for CS-Studio-on-Eclipse.
By the end of 2018, I believe it will  include the Data Browser and Scan Client functionality, so it'll be usable for beamlines here at SNS,
and thus also general users who want a CS-Studio type display tool.

Thanks,
Kay