View Construction in general

View Construction is a feature in AgileBrowser that allows incremental construction of views. View Construction is used when user wants to build complex graphs. A view is a set of elements and dependencies and their metadata. View Construction is operation oriented, which means that each view is produced out of a set of operations.

View Construction can be used with three different styles; Popup based actions from GUI, JSON script style from GUI console and JSON from CLI (Command Line Interface).

View Construction in GUI

GUI provides view management through Views-node of Repository tree. View Construction mode is not active automatically when using AgileBrowser. It must be activated by creating a View Construction view or by activating an existing view from the Repository tree. Views are automatically persisted, and may be removed from the pop-up menu.

Creating/Activating a View

View Construction View can be created via following ways:

• 'New View' -action from the pop-up menu of Repository tree under Views element.
• 'Create VC View from this' -action from the paper pop-up menu from the AgileBrowser graph. It creates corresponding View Construction view from the current graph.

When creating a new view it automatically activates the view. Existing View can also be activated from the View Reporitory tree. When View is activated it shows the View data as JSON in View Construction Console and displays the View as a graph.

The preferred approach for constructing view is to spot interesting elements and add them to the view using popup menu. Another approach for defining the view is to write view operations in JSON format. Perfom button generates the view using the current set of the operations included for the active view. Perform functionality parses the current JSON text, which may be hand-edited or created via popup menu actions.

Using View Construction

View Construction supports two different ways to use it from the AgileBrowser UI. Simple popup based operations and script style view construction. Basic idea is that, it is possible to add different view construction operations for same element and different operations for the another element. This way tt's possible to construct complex graphs out of SW asset. With View Construction it's possible to manipulate each element from the graph instead of manipulating the whole graph at the same time.

Adding New Operations for the Element

All the basic View Construction operations can be found from the View Construction popup menu. When the View Construction is activate, make a popup over an SW element. Some of the operations needs parameters. All the supported operations are described in the section Supported VC Operations.

When certain operation is selected and all the needed parameters are given, Graph is automatically manipulated to respond operation. Gear wheel icon in the upperleft corner indicates that element has been manipulated with a View Construction operation(s). Also the View Construction console is populated automatically with the corresponding JSON data.

More about generating view with using JSON is described in the JSON Data Format -section.

Modifying/Removing Operations

Modifying/Removing existing View Construction operations is possible in several ways. Easiest way is to do it from the element popup menu. First user has to make a popup over an element what includes view construction operations (gearwheel icon visible). Under the View Construction menu there has appeared a submenu called 'Operations done for the element'. From that menu it's possible to edit/remove wanted operation.

Also it's possible to modify/remove operation from the console. By selecting the operation from the console (mark the text), and then making a popup over the operation, it gives the possibility to edit current operation.

Captured image below shows the popup menu context for the modifying items.

Supported VC operations

Supported operations are:

• Add Element -Operation
• Remove Element -Operation
• Apply Detail Level -Operation
• Traverse Dependencies -Operation
• Add Element by Attribute -Operation
• Remove Dependencies -Operation
• Dependency Query -Operation
• Remove Unconnected Leafs -Operation
• Query -Operation
• Emphazise Node -Operation
• Enable Custom Edge Label -Operation
• Filter -Operation
• Remove Element Data -Operation
• Force Detail -Operation
• Add Dependencies -Operation
• Require Attribute Query -Operation

View Construction in CLI

The VC operations are available also in CLI (as JSON), but CLI will be later made available.