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gestalt

Table of contents

Launching the GUI

Running Gestalt without any arguments will launch into the GUI. Here you can interact with a set of predefined template files that are located in the /templates folder. Dropdown menus allow you to select whether you will be generating a CSS-Phoebus or caQtDM file and which template you will be using.

Upon selecting a template, a brief description of the template and the input data necessary will appear on the left hand side and an example piece of input data will be entered into the right hand pane. You can edit the input data directly or you can load an existing file off the disk. Currently, the only input datatype supported in the input pane is YAML.

Once you are satisfied, the “Write Output File” button will allow you to select the output filename and will run Gestalt to generate the file.

Adding a New Template

Once you have learned about how to write a Gestalt Template file, you may want to expose that template to users of the GUI. Allowing them to use it to generate their own files.

The registration system that the GUI uses is built out of the python module system, so the only thing that’s necessary is to drop a folder in the /templates folder and write an ‘init.py’ file that configures some variables. Taking a look at one of those init files:

from .. import registry

registry.add("Multimotor Display", path=__path__,
	qt_stylesheet = "layout.yml",
	css_stylesheet = "layout.yml",
	required_inputs=[
("MOTORS", 
"""Number of motors on screen
"""),
("ASPECT",
"""Aspect Ratio for the motor arrangement
"""),
("PADDING",
"""Pixels between each motor
""")], 
example=
"""MOTORS: 8
ASPECT: 2.0
PADDING: 15
""")

The first line imports the GUI’s registry. Then, it’s just a single call of the registry.add function. This function takes in six arguments; the name of the template to display to the user and five keyword arguments.

  • path - This should always be __path__ and is used to locate the rest of the files in the folder.
  • qt_stylesheet - The filename of the template file to use to generate caQtDM screens.
  • css_stylesheet - The filename of the template file to use to generate CSS-Phoebus screens. Much of the time you can use the exact same file for both outputs, but it’s possible that there are incompatibilities between the two systems.
  • required_inputs - A list of tuples that provides information about the input values expected to be provided.
  • example - The example input text that will be copied into the right hand pane of the GUI.

Optionally, you can also include a file named ‘thumbnail.png’ in the folder. This image will be displayed in the lower left corner when the template is selected to demonstrate an example of what the outputted screen might look like. The aspect ratio of this thumbnail should be 3:2. Apply transparencies on the sides if your screen has a more vertical orientation.