Slicer3 FlexibleLayouts

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  Project Week Main Page

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  Representation

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  UXP: specifiying initial layout grid

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  UXP: splitting a pane

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  UXP: deleting a pane

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  UXP: assigning content to a pane

Key Investigators

• GE: Jim Miller
• BWH/Isomics: Steve Pieper
• BWH: Wendy Plesniak
• Kitware: Sebastien Barre (the multi-camera / multi-3D view code in the "cameraviewhell" branch has been ported to 3.4 and is being tested).

Objective

• Continue implementing infrastructure and interface for generating custom layouts in Slicer3

Approach, Plan

• Representation and Logic are currently being implemented; finish this implementation and begin testing.
• Add functionality to read/write XML specification
• Integrate with exiting vtkMRMLLayoutNode
• Begin work on building GUI to support UXP design

Progress

• We had a nice design meeting, some notes from it are captured below
• Sebastien has mature implementation in vtkMRMLViewNode and vtkMRMLCameraNode to provide multiple views of the MRMLScene.
• Alex and Andreas will be looking at the current implementation of vtkSlicerViewerWidget and designing an appropriate superclass for this widget
• New class hierarchy will be developed (diagram) to generalize layout representation
• Custom Layout MRML/Logic maturing and will be checked in to trunk soon
• Custom Layout GUI will follow

References

• User Experience Design
• Representation

NOTES:

• Sebastien has been allowing creating multiple vtkMRMLViewerWidget or vtkMRMLCameraNode in the scenes
  • previously they were singletons
  • hard to patch underlying logic to take singleton status out.
  • sebastien made new branch off of 3.4 with his changes
  • found some bugs in trunk also (e.g. if close scene 3 or 4 times, can't exit slicer)
• He is testing now with multiple cameras and views
• Able to save, load, fiducials work ok
• will give Ron his code to test soon
• will patch 3.4 or put in 3.5 trunk after testing/fixing.
• In current implementation, new 3D views will populate tabbed 3D views...
• When populating custom layout, will have to count number of vtkMRMLViewNodes and assign to panes
• Representation for view: vtkMRMLViewNode: state for a 3D view vtkSlicerViewerWidget
• Rep for camera: vtkMRMLCameraNode:
  • vtkMRMLViewNodes have vtkMRMLCameraNodes;
  • ViewNodes can swap CameraNodes.
  • Seb mentions problem with a render being called in a viewer that has (temporarily) no camera, due to a swap -- vtk will create a new camera that has no MRML counterpart. This is addressed as described below.
  • A viewNode can use the camera from another viewNode (but in this case, a camera swap is implemented under the hood so that no viewer is without a camera.) --Can we generate an event when this swap happens in case we want to notify a user?
  • Many cameras can be created and a single ViewNode can switch to use any of them.
• Single scene contains all datasets; different datasets can be exposed/hidden in each view.
• How will this work in use: how to configure a node's display parameters for each defined view on the scene?
• Node's display params can consist of kwd/val pairs where kwd is the viewerID, value is the param for that viewer.
• How to present this through the GUI in an intuitive way? Will think about this.
• How about transforming camera with xform vtkCamera API's ApplyTransform() method. Apply this in the Render Method for the viewer widget?
• Discussing difficulty of transforming camera programmatically and combining interactively applied user transforms simultaneously.
• How to encapsulate the presentation mechanism for content in any "pane" in a layout.
• IGT toplevel has had to overload too many methods -- so would be good to have a better constructed superclass for vtkSlicerViewerWidget. (Alex & Andreas) will restructure this architecture a little bit to clean it up.
• Goal: vtkKWWidget <- vtkSlicerLayoutableWidget <- vtkSlicerWidget <- vtkSlicerSliceViewerWidget
• TableViewers, plot viewers would all be subclassed from vtkSlicerLayoutableWidget.
• Layout logic/mrml underway and will be checked in soon.; Layout GUI will take a bit more time.
• Each vertex in layout tree should point to a vtkSlicerLayoutableWidgetNode