User Manual
This document explains how to use the VI GUI.
Table of Contents
- Install Instructions
- The Main Menu
- The Pop-Up Menu
- Selecting Nodes and Adding them to a Subset
- Managing your Data Sets
- Various Settings
Also see the key bindings.
Install instructions
Installation
- Download and unzip the latest version of the VI software.
- Download and install the required software listed below in the order they are listed. Follow the instructions that come with the software. A common source of errors is not specifying the CLASSPATH and PATH environment variables correctly for Jogl. Do this VERY carefully. It is recommended that you install the Jogl jars and binaries in a separate folder and place it outside of the vi root directory.
- Configure the xml file (or use the default settings for your first try).
- Create a topology file. (or use the default one for your first try).
- Compile and run. (see below)
Required software
Java 6 JDK (JRE should suffice but better safe than sorry)
Compiling and running the software
Open a terminal window and navigate to the project root directory. (vi/)
For compiling the entire project type:
javac @VI
Running the VI software:
java com.ericsson.tic.vi.VI
Running the server (for testing purposes) type in a separate console:
java com.ericsson.tic.vi.pseudo.TICTest 16
You should see a promt where you can input commands. To start the server:
> on
Reset the server by typing:
> reset
When you start up the VI for the first time you will see this view (assuming you have started the server first). You can zoom in and out by using the scroll wheel, pan by dragging the map.
The Main Menu
In the top left corner you have a File menu where you can choose to open new windows, close the current window or to exit the software.
In the Settings menu you can change the rendering settings. More about that below.
The Help menu opens up this user manual. Note also the Shortcuts option which brings up a list of key bindings which might be useful.
The Pop-Up Menu (Right Click)
By right-clicking you bring up the pop-up menu which hosts all view specific settings and functions.
There are many options in the pop-up menu of which the most important one is the Change View option which changes the view from a 2D-map view to the 3D-globe view. You rotate the globe by dragging and you zoom with the scroll wheel similar to how you navigate in the 2D-map view. You also have the option to tilt the view. By holding down the Q key on the keyboard you tilt the view up. By holding down the A key on the keyboard you tilt the view down. You can always reset the navigation by changing the view a couple of times.
Most of the options should be fairly intuitive and you will probably understand what they do when you use them however a couple of options are not as straight-forward.
The first of these are the Brushing Markers. Brushing Markers are only active when you are in Brushing Mode so enabling or disabling these when you are not in Brushing mode will give no visual feedback.
To turn brushing on or off pull out the panel on the left side of the window and use the Brushing buttons (has a brush-icon) to brush a category. The Brushing Markers are the balls which light up any bars/nodes which has any positive values in the brushed category. Note that the text is bugged on the screenshot (this bug was fixed with the release of Mac OS X 10.5.6).
The 'Limit Rendering' option allows you to limit rendering by a factor of ten. That is, instead of having the scene redrawn 30 times per second you will instead have the scene redrawn 3 times per second. This makes the view a bit laggier but saves on system resources (CPU and GPU).
Splitting a view either vertically or horizontally creates two views which are independent of each other. Note that you can have multiple windows and multiple split views in each window. Note also that each of these views are given it's own tab in the View settings panel.
You may save your view settings and load them at a later time. Just choose Save or Load from the pop-up menu.
Selecting Nodes and Adding them to a Subset
You can select nodes by clicking on them. This may be difficult when you are zoomed out very far away from the globe or the map. By selecting a node you bring up a floating window which I call 'Labels'. If you untick the 'Show Labels' option in the pop-up menu the selected nodes will be highlighted with a red color.
Once you have selected a few nodes you can choose the option to 'Create Subset From Selected Nodes' which creates a so called 'Subset'. By choosing the option: 'Show Only the Subset' you can toggle between showing all or just the few nodes you had selected. The subset is stored along-side your other settings when you save your View Settings.
Managing your Data Sets
By default the Vi interface will guess which data you want to be used for which type of nodes. However, if you have multiple data sets which is tied to the same nodes or relations, you need to manually activate the once you want to see. You do this in the View Panel which you access by pulling out the left hand side panel and choosing 'Views' in the pull down menu at the top. If you have several views you can choose to map different data sets to each. Note that you can map a different data set to the labels than what is set for the bars and nodes!
Various Settings
The following images show various settings and how they affect the view.
The Settings menu sets global rendering settings. These settings affect all views.
There are also a few view specific settings.
In the top image (above) only bars are visible. The middle image shows Nodes and Bars. The bottom image shows only links (relations) and the texture has been hidden.
By default and if no data set is tied to the nodes the color of the nodes is given by the color set in the 'vi_interface.xml' file for each node type. The above image shows the result of shading the nodes based on their level.