Webstructor Views

Views

View is what you see you see the World through.

While World holds Things with their Properties (or relationships between Things), you may not see all Things and/or all their Properties. At the same time, you can see the same Thing and the same Property from different perspectives (even literally).

On the picture above, one world holds 17 Things (small ellipses) and 3 Views (large ellipses). At the same time, View 1 represents 8 Things; View 2 represents 9 Things and View 3 - 4 Things. In every View, Thing is represented by Node. That is, three Views in this example hold 21 Nodes representing 14 Things while 3 Things remain invisible.

Moreover, View is Thing itself (one might say that View extends Thing) and any View may have a Node representing other View.

Every View has certain properties used to represent Nodes inside itself. These properties are as follows.

Background color
Default Node color
Default link (relationship) color
Default text (node label) color
Kind of Link (Property) to display between Nodes
Type of Projector used to map 3-dimensional coordinates of Nodes in 2-dimensional plane
Coordinates of camera (avatar position) and direction of the camera (used by Camera Projector only)

You can change kind of Link and type of Projector using respective controls but you have no direct access to colors. You can change position and direction of camera using scrollbars and navigation keys. You can use scrollbars to browse the big picture if it doesn't fit the size of the window (Plain Projector) or direction of the camera using scrollbars. In current version, you can not change colors of the View (although you can do that using console).

When Plain Projector is selected, you use mouse to manage the View - clicking on objects and dragging them.

When Camera Projector is selected, you can also use the following keyboard keys for true 3-D navigation in your world.

Navigation Keys

HOME	- look straight
END	- turn around
UP	- forward
DOWN	- backward
LEFT	- rotate left (horizontal scrollbar)
RIGHT	- rotate right (horizontal scrollbar)
PGUP	- look up (vertical scrollbar)
PGDN	- look down (vertical scrollbar)
SHIFT+UP	- run forward
SHIFT+DOWN	- run backward
SHIFT+LEFT	- move left
SHIFT+RIGHT	- move right
SHIFT+PGUP	- fly up
SHIFT+PGDN	- fly down
MOUSE	- moves nodes within vertical plane (XY)
SHIFT+MOUSE	- moves nodes within horizontal plane (XZ)

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