30 September 2014 meeting, 11:00 - 12:15

Attendees

Conrad, Sam, Eric, Greg, TomG

Agenda

Should our APIs access only one global session data instance or allow multiple session data instances?

Action Items

Greg - Propose a session data API for Thurs Oct 2 meeting

Results

Support multiple session data objects. Discussed whether multiple Chimera sessions within the same Python process should be allowed, or only a single session. Decided to support multiple sessions at the Python API level. This will allow the possibility of command-line and GUI tools to compare sessions (Sam suggested a tabbed user interface), but we do not plan to implement those user interfaces in the near term.

Message logging is per-session. Discussed whether logging (errors, info, status) would be global or whether a routine that wanted to issue a log message would have to have a logger passed as an argument (or for methods the instance could have a logger attribute). Agreed that routines that want to log will take a logger argument that comes from a session. In other words, logging will be per-session and not global.

Exception handling. Discussed how Python exception handling would be logged. Which session would log the exception? Possible solutions were that all sessions would log the exception, or the most recently created session. Didn't reach a conclusion on how this will be handled.

Preferences are global. Discussed whether preferences are global or per-session. Decided they are global. Each session can have its own state setting such as background color blue, while the preference setting that determines the initial background color is a global setting. Discussed the open file history list -- does every session add to the same list? Yes. File history is like other hidden preference categories (in Chimera 1 lingo) where preference data is implicitly saved without the user pressing a Save Preference button. Eric suggests that each tool save its preferences in a separate file so that every preference change does not result in resaving all preferences.

Trigger notifications. Started discussing whether Chimera 1 triggers would be used in Chimera 2 and how they would operate with multiple sessions. Decided to defer this question to another meeting.