Overview of the iTool UI Panel

A UI Panel is a collection of user interface elements displayed in one or more tabs located on the right, left, or bottom edge of an iTool window. The UI panel interface makes it easy to attach a set of controls chosen by the iTool developer to the standard iTool interface.

Note
In the initial iTools release, only one user interface style is supplied: the IDL widget interface toolkit. As a result, UI panels consist of widgets from the IDL graphical user interface toolkit, displayed in a tab widget. As the iTools framework continues to grow, additional user interface styles may be created either by ITT Visual Information Solutions or by third-party developers.

Controls on a UI panel exchange information with the iTool itself via one or more callback routines. These routines allow the iTool to modify the controls in the UI panel as the user selects different visualization components or otherwise changes the contents of the visualization.

Creating and Using a UI Panel

To add a UI panel to the iTool interface, you will do the following:

Create an IDL procedure that creates the user interface elements that comprise the panel. See Creating a UI Panel Interface for details.

Create one or more event-handling routines to handle events generated by the user interface elements in the panel. See Creating a UI Panel Interface for details.

Create one or more callback routines to control the display of the items on the panel as the contents of the iTool window change. See Creating Callback Routines for details.

Create an iTool with the TYPES property set to the appropriate iTool type and register the UI panel with the iTool that will display it. See Registering a UI Panel for details.