Multi editor 3D and property sheet pages

Besides enabling 3D editors, IMHO one of the most interesting features of GEF3D is to combine existing editors. I already blogged about that feature one year ago, and since then GEF3D has been improved very much.

The rendering quality is now as good as in 2D, so it really makes sense to think about supporting 3D when creating new editors. However, the nice thing about GEF3D is, that you do not have to write new editors from scratch, instead, you can reuse existing editors. And, these reused editors can not only adapted in order to support 3D -- we call this "3D-fied" -- but they can also be adapted in order to be combined. For that, all you have to do is to let them implement a small interface INestableEditor. It is very simple, the GEF3D examples include 3D-fied and nestable versions of the UML2 Tools editors and the Ecore Tools editors.

When combining editors, a lot of new problems arise. One of these problems is how to create new edit parts. Every nested editor comes with its own factory -- but which one to use in case of newly created elements? This problem is solved in GEF3D for quite some time now (by the multi factory pattern). I only recently became aware of another "combination" problem: the property sheet page. Every editor provides its own page, created almost hidden via getAdapter(). Now -- what page do you want to use in case of a multi editor? The answer is simple: The right page, depending on the selected element. And this is what I've added to GEF3D: Depending on the currently selected element, the page provided by the nested editor responsible for that element should be used. The latest (SVN) revision of GEF3D provides a new page, called MultiEditorPropertySheetPage, which nests all the pages provided by the nested editors. Depending on the currently selected element, the appropriate page is shown, as you can see in the screenshots. As many things in GEF3D, this feature is almost transparent to the programmer.

use case selected, property page provided by nested UML editor

ecore class selected, property page provided by nested Ecore editor

The screenshots show an UML use case diagram (visualized with 3D-fied UML tools) and an ecore diagram (visualized with 3D-fied Ecore tools). The 3D-fied editors and the multi editor combining them are examples of GEF3D (that is, you will find everything in the SVN).

In many cases models are visualized as diagrams, and with GEF3D and its multi editor feature you will be able to easily display all your diagrams in a single 3D scene -- with things you aren't able to visualize in 2D editors, such as inter-model connections (traces, markers, mappings, or other kind of weaving models). Some products use the term "modeling IDE" -- think about the "I" in IDE and what GEF3D does with your models ;-)

BTW: The very same concept used for implementing property sheet pages may be implemented for the Outlook View as well -- volunteers wanted :-D

Jens