Layouts are in a binary format - XML someday?

[kirkilj]

I understand that it's probably not at the top of anyone's list, including mine, but I was wondering why the formats of Oxygen layout files are binary and not XML. Legacy?

John

[Costin]

Hello,

The layout configuration files are not our own, but a proprietary binary format of the JIDE Docking Framework. Also note that the .layout files are actually ZIP files and those in turn contain the binary layout files for each Oxygen perspective.

As you mentioned, having these in XML format is not essential.
BTW, why would you need to have those layout files as XML?

Regards,
Costin

[kirkilj]

Hello Costin and crew,

The origin of my question is a current effort to understand which stock Oxygen UI features can be hidden/shown/moved via the layout facility and which changes might require Java customization. I thought that if there was a human readable version of the layouts, I could deduce the options available via layouts by changing things through the GUI and seeing the corresponding changes to the serialized layout files.

We have defined different classes of users and the UI components that should be made available to them. Some of the UI elements, even in Author Mode, may be noise to users who just want to create and edit content and don't care that XML and DITA are under the hood. Even our editors, who know how to use Text Mode and are well-versed in DITA, don't need to see options for applying XSLT transforms, etc.

We are populating a spreadsheet to indicate where the hiding/showing, moving, renaming of specific UI elements (toolbars, menus, buttons, views, etc.) would have to be configured (via layouts, Framework CSS-Actions-Operations, or Java UI filters). This will help us understand the level of skill needed to achieve each customization.

I'm studying the documentation and Author SDK to discern this information. If there's a better way, please let us know.

Regards,

John

[Radu]

Hi John,

If you want to filter out actions from the toolbars from the Java API side there are two plugin types in our Plugins SDK:

http://www.oxygenxml.com/oxygen_sdk.htm ... er_Plugins

1) The Startup plugin allows you to filter the user interface based on certain action IDs. But it does not allow you to add extra stuff to it.

2) The Workspace Access plugin allows you to add a main menu customizer and a toolbar customizer:

Code: Select all

ro.sync.exml.workspace.api.standalone.StandalonePluginWorkspace.addMenuBarCustomizer(MenuBarCustomizer)

ro.sync.exml.workspace.api.standalone.StandalonePluginWorkspace.addToolbarComponentsCustomizer(ToolbarComponentsCustomizer)

These customizers allow you either to remove or to add stuff to the main menu or to the various toolbars which are available in Oxygen.

Maybe based on the user role you can load a custom XML format which describes what actions to remove, then using one of these plugins you remove from the UI those specific actions which are not necessary to the user.

Regards,
Radu