On Fri, 29 Oct 1999, Dan Cohn wrote:
> All of this talk recently abt special wavy lines implementation has
> started me thinking about what would be necessary to make the Network
> icons usable for generating the types of networking diagrams i use from
> day to day with my work. Amongst these are:
>
> 1) Lightning that behaves as lightning does in other packages such as
> visio, powerpoint. Lightning is used as a connector, which is essentially
> a line style. It has points on both ends, and the ends can be dragged to
> connection points at odd angles exactly as if it were a line. Its width
> attribute is scalable, so that it can look narrow or thick.. ie:
>
> Router
> / \
> // \\
> / \\
> Router \
> Router-=_
> ===
> -Router
Just derive from the element and implement your own draw() function. This
should be fairly simple.
> So this really becomes also a kind of special line that should show up
> under a specific panel. Can this be done with the existing custom object?
> If not, perhaps it would be worthwhile to allow for a more generalized
> customization of line-like connectors through the custom object as i
> expect things like this will probably recur.
Custom objects cannot be used for anything else than lineary scaled
"image-like" objects. They cannot change (else than scaling) when moving
a handle.
> 2) If (1) cannot be accomplished with the current custom code for the
> moment, i'm fairly certain it can be done the old way (ala ethernet bus in
> the network panel), but is there a way to mix the old method with the
> custom method of defining shapes within the same subpanel? I'm not clear
> on how this would be done. I want to start adding networking icons that
> are actually practical for designing routed and switched enterprise
> networks, but would of course prefer to do these as custom shapes from now
> on..
Looking at the current network pannel, most objects can be done as custom
objects, with ethernet bus being the only exception. Any special
connections (like the arrow above) would be an exception too.
These can be mixed though.
/ Alex
