Toolboxes

Where the documentation should be placed

• Programmer's Manual
  • source:grass/trunk/gui/wxpython/wxguitoolboxes.dox
  • ​http://grass.osgeo.org/programming7/wxguitoolboxes.html
  • without GUI it requires some knowledge so programmer's manual can be used
• here on Trac Wiki: ideas what could be done and how, bugs overviews etc.

Which toolboxes could be created

Toolboxes which could be created now in the source code (and included in the GRASS distribution):

• Temporal toolbox (not included in the default main menu).
• Some special sets of modules designed for particular purpose.

What is missing and what can be done in the future

• connection to addons:
  • there are already some toolboxes in addons (installing a toolbox installs the set of modules)
  • toolboxes (in the sense of pure list of modules) from addons can be either included in user toolboxes or
• GUI for creating toolboxes and editing main menu (see below)
• command line in the GUI now offers all modules on the path it is not bad but toolbox depended autocomplete is also interesting
• similar behavior for standard command line as for GUI command line
• connection to toolbars (images needs to be added)
• different handling of menu label for modules (e.g. including menu label into the module)
• use toolboxes in wxIClass (and others)
• redesign of handlers for non-module items (related to g.gui.* modules and plugins)
• better mechanism to determine when to generate new menudata.xml file
• translation of strings (currently there is some workaround which is not ideal)
• prepared specialized menus in the distribution
• connection of projects (workspaces) and toolboxes/main menu
  • main menu would need to changed on runtime which is not safe for all platforms

GUI front-end

There is no GUI to create or edit toolboxes. However, it is not considered as a priority because advanced users can edit XML files directly and beginners are usually not able or not want to do the customization themselves and some advanced user have to do the customization for them. Thus, we suppose that there is no need for GUI. Still, it would be nice to have that but the GUI implementation would be very complicated, probably more than the implementation of toolboxes itself (at least the basic implementation). For the future, the GUI can be added at any point and is partially independent on the concrete toolboxes implementation.

Creation of toolboxes from the old menu

Toolboxes which are now in GRASS distribution were created from the old menus and submenus and these toolboxes are used to create the same menu as it was before. Toolbox is a list of modules and it maps to one menu or submenu in the GUI. The same structure which is in the menu is also in the search module tab in the layer manager, so toolboxes are also there. If you are not using toolboxes, you get the same menu as before.

For the conversion a XSL Transformation (with EXSLT) was used:

• files:
  • attachment:menudata_to_toolboxes.xslt​
  • attachment:menudata_to_main_menu.xslt​
  • attachment:menudata_to_wxgui_items.xslt​
• example command for transformation:
  • xsltproc menudata_to_wxgui_items.xslt menudata.xml > wxgui_items.xml

See also

• wiki:Toolboxes
• ​http://grasswiki.osgeo.org/grass-wiki/index.php?title=Toolboxes&oldid=18478
• ​http://grasswiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Toolboxes