DaCoPAn Software Engeneering Project

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Settings

The DaCoPAn animator can be tuned to adapt it to the different user purposes. The setting panels are the interface for the user to set the animator parameters.

Accessing the setting panels

There are two ways to access to the setting panels:

From the main toolbar clicking on the icon for the settings
The settings icon

From the menu: File->Settings
Accessing to the settings through the menu

Types of settings

There are some different types of settings depending on their functionality. They have been divided into three basic categories

Scale Settings

Setting up the animation display size and the speed of it are the most basic features of the animator and the user will need to tune them often to get the visualization. The scale settings panel contain some elements that will made easier to adjust these values.

Scale settings Panel
Scale settings

Elements to display in a layer

The MSC animation lets the user to show some information about the network units while the animation is running. There are two types of data that can be shown in the screen: variables (host-dependent values that are changed during the network transactions) and protocol header fields (value extracted from the header of a message exchanged in the network).

Protocol header fields and variables are values specific to a layer, so the animator creates a panel per layer to select the fields and variables to display. These selection are made through two separeted lists that contain the different variables and fields for the different protocols in that layer.

These selections are made by single-clicking on the different items in the list. No group selections are allowed. To deselect an item just single-click it again. Due to screen space issues when drawing the animation the number of variables and header fields that can be swown has been limited. The actual limits for them are 3 variables and 5 protocol header fields. If this limits are reached a message is displayed, as you can see in the figure.


Layer settings panel

The variables and protocol header fields are displayed in different places in the MSC animation. The variables are shown in the columns every time that a message unit is sent or received (message unit event). The protocol header fields are displayed over the lines that represent the message unit.


Variables and protocol header fields represented in the MSC animation

Performance settings

These settings let the user select the load of the animator over the system in wich is running.

Performance settings panel
Performance settings

Settings and working modes

The panels displayed to change the settings are different depending on the working mode of the DaCoPAn animator, due to the different purposes of the two modes.

Explore mode

In the explore mode the complete set of settings can be configured, these are settings are:

Scenario mode

A smaller number of settings can be configured here. Due to the purpose of creating a item for the scenario playlist, only the settings needed for one of those items is displayed:


The autoplay checkbox in the layer settings panel

Another place where the setting panels can be invoked is from the recording mode of the scenario playlist. In the scenario playlists the MSC elements settings can be edited by pressing the edit button. The panels open to edit the element settings are the same as the ones for the scenario mode but the values changed are the ones that the MSC element contain.


Editing and msc item in the scenario playlist


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