This is a collection of thoughts on AIDA Styles and on their use in the new plotter.
Style Store
This is an object that can save and retrieve styles from a store (xml file on disk, database table). The basic xml style definition is the AIDA one. Next to the style itself we also identified the need to define #Style Rules that should also be saved/retrieved to/from the store:
<styleStore> <styles> <style> ....... <rules> <rule> ....... </rule> </rules> </style> </styles> </styleStore>
Multiple stores might be loaded at once: System Store, Personal Store, Group Store, Experiment Store. Their information is grouped and managed by a #Style Registry
Style Rules
It should be possible to define rules on how to attach a style to a particular plot object. Multiple rules might be applied to a given style. It should be possible to apply rules to:
- object type: hep.aida.IHistogram1D, org.myproject.MyData1D
- object path: with path expressions like "MC/**"
- plot order: a specific order position, 0, 7 or a cyclical recurrence (3) -> every third plot
- action: like printing (plots for printing might require less details)
- category: "experiment=GLAST, quality=preliminary"
Style Registry
A style registry combines the styles and rules from different style stores and provides the right set of styles (with the appropriate order) for a given plot object.
Style Order
We have to define the order in which the styles are applied to an object:
- passed style (when plotting)
- explicit in annotation (like labels)
- implicit:
- action
- category
- plot order
- path
- type
Style Editor
GUI front end for viewing and editing individual styles or combinations of styles.
We already have a first version of the style editor. We need to add the possibility to view the information contained in a style registry, i.e. the chain of styles contributing to a given object and the set of rules that have contributed to it.
Comments to AIDA Styles
- does isVisible() belong to IBaseStyle?
- can we plot an object by passing only an IDataStyle (rather than an IPlotterStyle)?