2013 Project Week:SimplifyMRMLReference
Key Investigators
- Isomics: Alex Yarmarkovich, Steve Pieper
- Andras Lasso
- Kitware: Julien Finet, Jean-Christophe Fillion-Robin
Objective
Slicer4 MRML node referencing mechanism needs some design improvement, as for each referenced node in each node type about 10 methods shall be added/updated manually. This is very difficult to do, often done incorrectly. The goal is to discuss the details and design robust, simple, centralized implementation of all node reference updates for save/load, undo/redo, scene import features
Approach, Plan
A potential solution would be to introduce a "ReferencedNodes" list, which would store pointer, ID string, node type name, and observers for each referenced node instead of adding separate member variables for these manually. This list could be fully maintained by the Copy, UpdateScene, UpdateReferenceID, UpdateReferences, ReadXMLAttributes, WriteXML, etc. methods implementation in vtkMRMLNode base class. Developers would just need to add an item to the ReferencedNodes list and all the rest would be handled by the MRML framework.
Progress
- Design meeting held on 01/08/2013: Yarmarkovich, Steve Pieper, Andras Lasso, Julien Finet, Jean-Christophe Fillion-Robin
- A more general MRML node reference architecture were proposed and discussed.
- Reference node API should be developed in the base vtkMRMLNode including:
- creating and managing references for a particular category, for example "displayNode" or "transformNode".
- managing references together with observers and events
- Alex created a github topic branch with the prototype API:
https://github.com/ayarmarkovich/Slicer/tree/mrml_ref_branch
- Success criteris: implementation of vtkMRMLDisplayableNode should utilize new reference API and the tests associated with it should still pass.
Delivery Mechanism
This work will be delivered to the NA-MIC Kit as changes in the Slicer4 core and in the SlicerRT extension
