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O Pe NDAP Discovery And Subsetting

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I have been prototyping a UI for getting OPeNDAP data into Kepler.

So my idea was to use a browser to allow the user to navigate to datasets of interest using the OPeNDAP servers web interface. When the user selects a data set by clicking on an of the DAP response types the request is caught and the DDS is rendered as a "selection" tree like one might see in a typical software installer:

Software Installer Snap

Where the interface allows the use to select parts of the hierarchy by clicking the selection boxes. Selecting a node selects all of it's children. Expandin a node and selecting some of it's children cuases the selection icon for the node ito indicate that is partially selected. So I would sketch the UI like this:

UI Sketch

So I built a simple prototype. The browser is pretty limited (it doesn't do javascript or Ajax) but it works. Here is a snapshot of the UI pointed at a collection page of the OPeNDAP test server:

UI Snapshot 1

Clicking on one of the data set links on the left causes the UI to look at the dataset and load it's type hierarchy into the center pane and it's metadata into the left pane:

UI Snapshot 2

And I stopped there because it's clearly going to get a lot more complex pretty quickly and I want to get peoples input.

So I have some questions:

  1. Does this seem like a reasonable design time inteface?
  2. Does anyone know of a java library that implements a JTree as the selection tree in the first image? Basically I can see how to implement custom icons and the like in a JTree but I am stuck on how to get the mouse event behavior I want. The software installer that I pictured above works like this:
    • Single clicking on a triangle icon toggles expansion/collapse of the associated node.
    • Single clicking the check box of an item toggles it's selection (checked or unchecked)
    • Double clicking the name of a node toggles expansion/collapse of the node.
    • Nodes that are partially selected have "-" icon


Attachments:
PartialSelect.tiff Info on PartialSelect.tiff 1382 bytes
PartialSelect.gif Info on PartialSelect.gif 1382 bytes
menu.jpg Info on menu.jpg 50300 bytes
db2.jpg Info on db2.jpg 176053 bytes
db0.jpg Info on db0.jpg 465287 bytes
db1.jpg Info on db1.jpg 199686 bytes


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This particular version was published on 18-Sep-2007 15:28:45 PDT by uid=potter,o=unaffiliated.