Navigator application

[abrahamwolk]

Dear All,

The following are instructions on how to run the Navigator application that we have been developing at ESS, and that I presented at the codeathon last week.

The implementation of the Navigator application currently lives on the branch CSSTUDIO-1989-navigator. Building Phoebus from this branch results in a build of Phoebus with the navigator included.

There are three configuration configuration options for the Navigator, the two first ones of which must be set in order for the Navigator to work correctly:

org.phoebus.applications.display.navigator/navigator_root=<directory-containing-navigators>
org.phoebus.applications.display.navigator/opi_root=<directory-containing-OPIs>
org.phoebus.applications.display.navigator/initial_navigator=

The last option specifies which navigator should be loaded on startup, and can be left blank.

In order to start the navigator, one can start it under Applications -> Display -> Navigator. An icon will then appear in the toolbar that can be used to toggle the visibility of the Navigator on and off.

Alternatively, in order to start the Navigator on startup of Phoebus, one can specify the arguments -app navigator on the commandline used to launch Phoebus.

[abrahamwolk]

I should add that on Windows, I believe, two backslashes in a row (i.e., "\\") should be used to indicate a sub-folder when specifying the configuration options instead of just a single backslash ("\"). The reason is that single backslashes "\" are parsed as escaping the next character. E.g.: C:\directory\opis\ should be specified by: C:\\directory\\opis\\.

On Mac OS or Linux, this is not an issue.

[abrahamwolk]

We would be very interested in hearing and discussing any feedback, in case someone tests the Navigator!

@shroffk: I believe you asked about supporting multiple navigator- and OPI-directories; do you have a concrete proposal about how that would function?

[abrahamwolk]

Given that there have been no responses to this discussion, I conclude that it is very likely that there is no interest in the Navigator outside of ESS.

There is basically two options for merging the changes required into Phoebus:

1. I create a pull request with the changes required in the Phoebus source code for the Navigator to work, and ESS maintains and deploys the Navigator at ESS as a site-specific module that is not included in the Phoebus source code.
2. The Navigator module is also added to the Phoebus source code, in addition to the changes to Phoebus required to make it work. The module could be disabled by default.

I propose option 1, given that other sites have not expressed interest in the Navigator; does anyone have any thoughts on this?