Workflow Director and Actor Dialogs

STATUS

The content on this page is outdated. The page is archived for reference only. For more information about current work, please contact the GUI Group.

Overview

Current and proposed designs for workflow, actor, and director dialogs.

Overall Design Rationale

• Consolidate various dialogs into tabbled dialogs so users don't have to open different dialogs when dealing with one object such as a workflow, actor or director. And so they aren't confused as to which "configure" dialog they need to access.
• Remove computer centric terminology and use standard terminology. Speak the user’s language.
• Use standard HF layout principles (alignment, grouping, spacing etc.).
• Use UI elements appropriately.
• Add general tabs for consistency.
• Add new functionality tabs (e.g. annotation).

Workflow Dialogs

Current Workflow Dialogs

 

 

Proposed Workflow Tabbed Dialog

 

 

 

 

Director Dialogs

Current Director Dialogs

 

 

Proposed Director Tabbed Dialog

 

Actor Dialogs

Current Actor Dialogs

 

 

Proposed Actor Tabbed Dialog

 

 

 

 

 

Notes

Some discussion at Feb kepler-dev meeting about dividing things distinctly into workflow, actor and director objects since all of them have parameters. Some see workflow and actor as very similar since a composite actor is both a workflow and an actor and both have parameters, ports etc. So there was one suggestion to have just a director dialog and another workflow/actor dialog with either greyed out tabs that didn't apply or different sets of tabs depending on what object user has selected. or it might be the case that all tabs are present and some are blank if a workflow happens not to have any ports for example. The issue here is that conceptually we talk about workflows, directors and actors as different objects in the documentation even though a composite actor can also be a workflow but is also an actor. So whatever changes we make, the documentation will need to reflect that. A workflow is what is referenced in the documentation as the thing with the filename that you open. So when that was brought up, it was decided that we would use the terminology conceptually of workflow (the file name), and that composite actors would now be called sub-workflows and they are collections of actors.

This shift will allow us to have a configure dialog for the director and a common configure dialog for workflow/sub-workflow and actor with the same set of tabs. If a tab is not needed for a particular object (e.g., Notes tab for actor), it will be disabled or not shown (decision pending).

Per email from Matt, we aren't quite sure about changing composite to subworkflow so for now (3/1/2006) will will not make that terminology change.