Commands for examining whiteboards
A Whiteboard may be displayed using the Whiteboard command registered with the Commander:
Whiteboard name (displays the named whiteboard).
The whiteboard is looked up in the Cypress database named by the Whiteboard.Segment entry in your user profile. If no whiteboard with the given name is found in this database, a new one will be created (if you have write access to the database).
Whiteboards may be manipulated using the menu at the top of a whiteboard window, or by using mouse buttons with special meanings within the whiteboard itself. For the purposes of browsing, only middle-button selection within the window itself will be needed. Middle-button selection means "open": whenever the user points at an icon on a whiteboard and presses the middle button, a new window is opened on the screen displaying the entity represented by that icon.
Use middle-button selection to examine items on the Cedar whiteboard. Note that documents and programs open Tioga windows or start programs, respectively. Documents appear as the familiar Cedar icons for ducments, and programs as their normal icons as well. Whiteboards may be nested inside whiteboards: they appear as icons resembling phyusical whiteboards. Try browsing through some of these. Each time you select an icon, a new window will be created on the screen. You will require only the middle mouse button for this browsing. For browsing of the network structure of the whiteboards, try middle-button selection of a whiteboard while holding down the control key. All of the whiteboards contained in the selected whiteboard will be iconically displayed, with lines drawn to illustrate the structure. These new whiteboards can be opened or similarly expanded.
Commands for editing whiteboards
The Cedar Whiteboards are readOnly for almost everyone, so you won't be able to edit them (you can however, move things around on a whiteboard -- you just won't be able to make any permanent changes). If you plan to create or edit your own whiteboards, you will need to know about more than just browsing with middle-button selection.
The meaning of the menu buttons on a Whiteboard are as follows:
Freeze: Retains this whiteboard on the screen, rather than replacing it with another whiteboard, when middle-button selection would normally display something else in it.
Reset: Restores a whiteboard to its state before any edits were made. This may take some time, since a Reset forces Cypress to discard any pages of the database that it may have cached (to guarantee that the display is consistent with the most recent contents of the database).
AddSelected: You select an icon somewhere at the bottom of the Cedar Viewers screen for this command. The selected entity is added to the whiteboard. It may already be a database entity (e.g. another whiteboard entity), or it may be a Tioga document or Cedar program (in which case a database entity may be created to represent it).
Note: Being able to put tools on a whiteboard means that you can add things like SIL files or Press files to a whiteboard display, since the whiteboards code remembers not only the name of the tool but also any arguments used to create the particular tool viewer that was added to a whiteboard. For instance, try displaying a SIL file using Cedar SIL and then adding the SIL viewer to a whiteboard. This places on the whiteboard an icon that will load SIL (if it is not already loaded) and will create a SIL viewer displaying the same SIL file. Just remember, if you do this on a public whiteboard to make sure that the file being displayed is in a public place! (The same trick works using ShowPress to display Press files.)
AddCommandFile: You can add command files to a whiteboard by selecting a file viewer and applying this menu button. The command file will be added using a Typescript icon (suggesting its use); when opening the icon a CommandTool will be started to perform the operations specified in the file.
Erase: Erases the entire whiteboard, but no need to panic ... this edit isn't commited to the database until you actually Save the whiteboard.
HELP: Adds a text box to the whiteboard which contains the instructions for editing the whiteboard using the mouse.
Grid: You may want the icons and text boxes on the whiteboard to line up either vertically or horizontally. The Grid menu item lets you set the size of a grid (in pixels) on which to place viewers on a whiteboard. The default grid size is 1; it can be doubled (up to a maximum of 32) by left-clicking the menu item and halved by right-clicking the menu item. Each time the grid is changed, the whiteboard will be redisplayed. Moreover, new items added to the whiteboard will only be allowed to settle on points on the grid (for icons, this means that the top left corner will be on a grid point, for text boxes that all of the corners will be on grid points).
Save: Stores any edits to the whiteboard in the database; removes "[New Version]" at top of window. An attempt to store changes for a whiteboard may fail if the server has crashed, the database is readonly (you don't have permission to change it), the transaction aborted (this is quite unlikely), or someone else has updated the whiteboard since you began editing it. If this later case arises, you will be notified with the message Can't Save -- whiteboard has wrong version in the message window; the contents of the whiteboard will not be altered, so that you can save the contents of any text boxes that you have edited; you must do a Reset before editing, however, to retrieve the new contents of the whiteboard.
In addition to the commands at the top of a Whiteboard window, mouse button presses within the window area itself have specific effects on the entity the mouse is pointing at. Because mouse selections have their Tioga meanings when the cursor is inside text boxes, you must select just outside to get these effects on text boxes. The mouse buttons and their effects are:
Left: Selects and moves the icon for the entity (or a text box) around on the whiteboard.
Shift Left: Adds a new text box to the whiteboard at the location of the cursor. The text box can then be grown, moved, or typed into.
Control Left: Deletes the entity from this whiteboard.
Middle : Opens a displayer on the entity (or activates a tool).
Shift Middle : Opens a full-sized displayer on the entity
Control Middle : Expands the selected whiteboard. All whiteboards contained in the selected whiteboard are displayed, with lines drawn to illustrate the network structure. The added whiteboards can be opened, moved, deleted, etc... , but are not saved as permanent edits.
Right: Grows (or shrinks) a text box.
Finally, there are a few command-tool commands available for manipulating whiteboards. They are: