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)?