Sirius GUI Toolkit : Toolbars

Sirius contains a generic toolbar component that allows multiple components to be folded, unfolded and rearranged dynamically. Several toolbar widgets are available that can easily fit into the toolbar model, or be used independently.

Navigation Bar

The Navigation Bar uses generic Uncle Unc navigation code to provide a browser-like buttonbar with facilities for navigating a history list, jumping to the scrapbook view, etc.

Pager Bar

The Pager Bar provides a flexible way of managing paging functionality of the Unc framework that should be familiar to users of web search engines.

The default paging length is 24 items per page. A value of -1 indicates that all items be shown at once.

The page length may be typed into the box on the right in order to revise page length. The links to each available page will adjust themselves dynamically,

and be added as more Items are added to the View. (Here we are reading from a large log file. The entries only get added as we press the 'next arrow', and the next chunk of log file is read. Note that the left-hand-side description states a total of 'at lest' so many entries.)

If too many pages are present to comfortably display as links, it is replaced by a text-input area, pls links to the first and last known page.

Filter Bar

The filter bar allows ad hoc construction of filter queries, filtering against regular expressions on a range of properties. Any propery that is displayed as a column in the View Pane can be selected. Other filter types can be added programmatically to the right-hand-side drop-down list, typically specific to each View type (e.g. hide or show hidden files, directories etc. in a filesystem View).

By default, the text input accepts simple globbing expressions ('*' indicates a wildcard), familiar to file dialog users. Power users may prefer to use Perl5-style regular expressions, by quoting them in the '/' character.

Ancestor Pane and Dropdown

It may be useful to display the full ancestry of the current Item (i.e. it's parent, view, the parent's parent and so on). The underlying code for resolving ancestry is UI-independent, and can be accessed by two widgets in the sirius toolkit.

The AncestorPane is a toolbar-style widget showing all ancestors in a line, in a style popularised in web interfaces by the Yahoo! directory.

The Ancestor dropdown is a more compact alternative, shown here outside the Toolbar as part of a more compact composite strip tool in a javabean component.

Grouping Picker Widgets

An Item's properties and methods may be grouped, as a useful way of organising them when there are a large number (e.g. a java.awt.Component when wrapped will expose over a hundred properties and methods).