We had a call with Thilina, Michael and myself. We discussed the progress with CWL-browse so far, which is slightly ahead the plan:
Blog: http://maanadevgsoc2016.blogspot.co.uk/ Merged pull request: https://github.com/apache/incubator-taverna-common-activities/pull/4 So the CWL "description" field is now shown within the Available Services, but of course it's not much space with about 40 characters shown on a single line, per tool - but many CWL tools might have quite long descriptions, e.g. https://github.com/common-workflow-language/workflows/blob/master/tools/ucsc-liftOver.cwl#L7 In addition parameters in CWL can have a label, description and a format - even if we don't check the format it is useful information to present. So perhaps we should add a Service Detail panel for CWL that includes this after a CWL Tool has been added to the workflow? This is called a Contextual View - in the Taverna 2 plugin tutorial see: http://dev.mygrid.org.uk/wiki/display/developer/4.+Viewing+service+details The tutorial adds a basic JPanel. You can try this first with some simple JLabels, but it can take forever to figure out a good layout here (that also fit in the constrained space of the Service Detail panel). For an example, here's how the WSDL activity contextual view for 2.5 looks: https://github.com/apache/incubator-taverna-workbench-common-activities/blob/old/wsdl-activity-ui-1.5/src/main/java/net/sf/taverna/t2/activities/wsdl/views/WSDLActivityContextualView.java Here it uses a <html>-based JLabel - note that it's not proper HTML, but it can support some basic text formatting (but not hyperlinks!), and more importantly, handles line-wrapping and things like that as you would generally expect. (But you might have to do some simple Markdown-like conversion of the CWL description, e.g. so \n\n is shown as a <p> -- I don't think any particular format has been specified) The nitty-gritty details where it describes each port: https://github.com/apache/incubator-taverna-workbench-common-activities/blob/old/wsdl-activity-ui-1.5/src/main/java/net/sf/taverna/t2/activities/wsdl/views/AbstractXMLSplitterActionView.java In that example it extracts "descriptor.getDocumentation()" which is parsed from the WSDL file. You would need a similar way to pass along the descriptions in your beans. The equivalent code for Taverna 3 is not very different, except how it get holds of its getActivity(): https://github.com/apache/incubator-taverna-workbench-common-activities/tree/master/taverna-wsdl-activity-ui/src/main/java/org/apache/taverna/activities/wsdl/views -- Stian Soiland-Reyes Apache Taverna (incubating), Apache Commons http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9842-9718
