Functional Design Specification
How the program should behave in practice for the user. Page 3 of 4
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Audit Drawing
Fig 2.3 Audit text window
Selecting Audit drawing opens up a text window which displays the results of an audit of the drawing currently open. This can also be reached using the command audit fro the internal command line. The audit process checks the drawing database of the file and displays the information form each step into the text window. It is provided so that the user can help determine if an encountered problem is with a drawing or with the program
Information from the audit window can be selected, copied and pasted into other programs such as text editors, email clients etc.
Report
Selecting report brings up the report dialogue box which consists of two tabbed pages. There is also a keyboard shortcut ctrl-R and the command report which can be used from the internal command line to open the same dialogue.
The first tab shows an expandable tree view of various items found in the drawing database in a single viewpane, with a single button to exit the dialogue. Selecting one of the + signs in the list will expand that branch of the tree, displays further details, whereupon the + symbol will turn to a minus sign. Selecting the minus sign will then contract the branch.
The second tab shows reporting options, its purpose being to allow the user to customize the information presented in the report and choose its output format. To the left, a series of checkboxes allow the type of information to be included in the report to be selected. Information corresponding to unselected checkboxes should not be present in the end report. To the right a choice of either HTML or text output is available. Only one may be selected at once.
The HTML output should pass the W3C's HTML validator as being valid HTML. In addition a XTML header is used so that the output should also be valid XML, and the document must be well-formed to meet this criteria. The output should contain the data in table format where relevant and make use of standard HTMl document structure, such as headings etc.
Selecting the plain text output enables a series of possible options below tyhat allow the user to choose the delimiter used to seperate data in the plain text file. Plain text is formatted only with delimiters and line breaks. The selected delimiter must correspond to the delimiter in the text that is output.
Below these boxes are a series of buttons. The first allows the user to see a preview of the report, by opeing up a text window and displaying the results of the output of the report corresponding to the options the user choose.
The next button allows the user to select a font for the output. Selecting this button opens a further dialogue for choosing the font, font-style, font-size, font-effects and style, together with a preview window for rendering an example of the font for the user to see. Possible font choices are selected from the currently available system fonts. Currently, selecting a font maxes no difference to the output.
Selecting the print report option opens up the previously desribed ctrl-p printer dialogue box but with the printer output being the script generated from the report dialogue.
Selecting save file opens a basic save file dailogue box similar to the one described for saving printer output to a file, but with "all files" as the file output mask in the drop down option selection for save as file type.
The 'WriteBCF' button operates as in other dialogues described previously. The option to Write BCF is to create a Batch Conversion File. Selecting this option begins the process for creating a reference file for the conversion of many files at once, without needing the Graphical User Interface, e.g. from the command line. The options required for saving are first selected by the user, and then the Write BCF button selected. The file ~/lx-viewer/convert.bcf is then created but on a windows system.... Note that no information is added to the file at this stage. If the file already exists and is writable, it will be overwritten. If it is not possible to write this file then an error message appears stating in plain language the error and possible causes and remedies. Else, if the creation of the file is successful, a dialogue box (Figure 1.8) then appears to ask the user if they want Lx-Viewer to remain open or not after it has performed the batch conversion. An option of yes or no is provided. Once selected all information is then written to the bcf file. This BCF file has no effect if you call the batchconvert function from within LX-Viewer.
Batch Convert
Selecting the batch convert option displays the batch conversion dialogue windows, which allows the selection of multiple files. The dailogue box is similar to the save and open dialogue boxes in that it consists of a central viewpane with the directory displayed above and view changing options to the top right (up a directory, create new directory, list view and detail view). Below the central viewpane is the filename input text box and the selection mask drop down option which allows the display of DXF/DWG files or all files.The selection masks sufer from the case sensitive error.
The internal command line command to bring up this option is bconvert .
Multiple files can be selected and converted from DWG or DXF files into any format supported by LX-Viewer
The user selects the files that they wish to convert, and then use the ADVANCED button to select the various file types and options this should be open by deault in this instance. Then select OK to start the batch convert this button should be labelled start.
During the batch process drawings will only appear on the screen when converting into BMP and PNG formats. The user can track the progress by watching the status bar at the bottom of the screen.
Batch Plot
The internal command line command to bring up this option is bplot .
Not done yet - manual details only
Shortcut Key: none Command: bplot This function will allow you to plot batches of DWG or DXF files. Selecting this command will open up a file dialog in multi file selection mode. Select the files that you wish to convert and press the open button. You will then be presented with the plot dialog so that you may change plot settings. All plot settings selected will apply to the entire batch of drawings.
Quit
The Quit option can be selected using the mouse or with the shortcut key ctrl-Q. Note that the user recieves no warning when exiting the application and leaving a drawing modified, open and unsaved.