About User Interfaces

When adding a new CLEF node, you need to define how the end user will interact with the node and any model output, document output, or apply nodes that the extension specifies. The user interface for each object is defined in a UserInterface section of the specification file for the extension. This chapter provides a detailed description of the UserInterface section.

Note: There can be more than one UserInterface section in a single specification file, depending on what types of objects are defined in the file.

The user interface to a CLEF object consists of one or more of the following:

• Menu entry
• Palette entry
• Icons
• One or more dialog windows
• One or more output windows

Menu entries and palette entries provide access to the object from the IBM® SPSS® Modeler menu system and node palettes, respectively. Icons identify objects on the menus, on the drawing canvas, and in the various node palettes. Dialog windows contain tabs and controls to enable users to specify various options before a stream is executed and, optionally, to specify output to be produced when execution completes. Output windows are used to display model output (such as the results of applying a model to a set of data) or document output (such as a graph).

CLEF enables you to add new types of objects to the standard ones provided by IBM SPSS Modeler and supports a consistent approach to defining the user interface for these new objects. Designing Node Icons and Designing Dialog Boxes provide guidelines for creating icons and dialogs in CLEF.

Icons take the form of graphics that identify a particular node and appear inside the geometric shapes that identify the node type.

Dialogs and output windows have the following characteristics:

• Title bar containing miniature icon and object title
• Menu bar that can contain:

  • Menus

  • Object-specific action buttons

  • Common actions buttons (for example, Maximize or Help)

• Main content area
• Multiple tabs to organize the UI components into logical groups
• Resizing capability

A tab changes the main content area of a window in different ways. For a dialog window, different tabs display different sets of controls for the object properties. The controls can be modified, and the results are applied to the underlying object when the user clicks the Apply or OK button.

For an output window, tabs enable the user to perform different actions related to the output, such as displaying a summary of the results or adding annotations to them.