Main menu

Modified on 2011/11/05 15:16 by Ekaterina — Categorized as: Panels and menus

Table of Contents [Hide/Show]

Description
Menus
    File Menu
    Edit Menu
    Event Menu
    Element Menu
    Library Menu
    Proxies Menu
    Snippets Menu
    Actions Menu
    Help

Description ¶

At the top left corner a Main Menu is shown (Figure 1). Options in this main menu are defined as: File, Edit, Experiment, Event, Library, Parameters, Snippets and Actions.

Figure 1: Main menu on the Main window.

Menus ¶

File Menu ¶

File menu allows the user to:

create New files,
Open existing files (from a known folder within a browsable system),
Save current experiment with the same previous name and in the same previous location
Save As to give the current file a new name and save it in a new location if desired.
Change basic Preferences (see the table)
Enable and disable AddIns with AddIn Manager, which shows the path to the Addin directory.

Figure 2: What is seen upon clicking on Prefereces

Name	Description	Default settings
Display
Runtime Display	The system monitor that will display the main experimental window.	"Auto Selection", the primary display will be used.
SubScreen Display	The system monitor that will display the operator screen.	"Auto Selection, the secondary display will be used.
Code editor
Font:	The font that will be used when displaying code snippets.	Courier New
Font Size	Changes the size of the font used to display code snippets.	12
Background	Changes the background colour of the snippet boxes.	White
Font Color	Changes the font color of the snippet code.	Black
GUI settings
GUI Animation	Turns on and off animation of graphical user interface.	True. Working on slow computer select 'False' to get better GUI performance.
Run history
Secured Period (days)	Set up maximal age of the run history in days. Any run record and associated report data with a longer age will be removed automatically, if the record is not locked in the history.	7

Edit Menu ¶

Similarly to many other programs, the Edit option allows the user to

Undo (Ctr+Z) the previous action,
Cut (Ctr+X),
Copy (Ctr+C)
Paste (Ctr+V) snippets of code and elements.

Event Menu ¶

The Experiment option allows users to

Add New Event (Ctrl + F8)
Delete Event.

Events are a fundamental notion of EventIDE; they could be defined as every little step in the experiment, as every temporal moment in the experimental sequence. New event appears on the Event panel.

Figure 3. New added event

Links between events can also be controlled using

Make Circular Links,
Make all-to-Links
Delete Selected Links option.
See the Layers section for more information on linking events.

Element Menu ¶

Event is used to add new elements to an event (see Elements and Resource Library). Images, videos and buttons (Figure 4) are considered elements and these can be added or deleted using the Event menu option. These elements will be used to construct the events; an event has no sense without elements defined therein.

Figure 4: Elements available in Event option. These are the possible structures that could be added to an Event to define this particular step in experiment development.

Library Menu ¶

The Library option gives you the possibility of interacting with resources in the experiment such as images and videos (see Elements and the Resource Library). When Library menu is selected (Figure 5) from the main menu you can:

Load items: Allows you to add a new file to the library from a particular folder.
Add Custom XAML: Allows you to add a new sheet of code where you can define, through XAML code whatever figure (Ellipse, Rectangle, Line, Cross) you are interested in. These kind of elements are interesting because they can adopt properties such as changing size as a function of time or other parameters, or changing colour or position whereas images cannot.
Resources in the library will be sorted in alphabetical order, if the option Ascending Order is selected.
To Add folder is also possible - not a single image or element but a whole folder of them will be added, converting into accessible resources for EventIDE.
Update items is a useful option if images or elements in the experiment have changed slightly. Provided that the files names are the same, this option will update the file within EventIDE, without the need to reimport new files as new elements.
Resources can be deleted from the library either using the Delete items option or by selecting those resources in the library that you want to delete and just pressing Delete on the keyboard.

Figure 5: Library options are only available when library is selected in the main screen.

Proxies Menu ¶

Several properties of an element can be converted using the parameters functionality. When one or more of these properties are selected this option allows you to convert them to parameters which form the base of your code. In the snippets you can introduce these parameters and functions to change them as your experiment goes on or to get them in a data file. The options are

add Proxy,
add proxy array
add proxy hub.
Remove Proxy
Rename proxy
You can also unpin all proxies (see Proxy Variables for description).

Snippets Menu ¶

Using the snippets boxes the user can develop code to manipulate the experiment as required. The Snippet option on the Main Menu allows the user to

compile Snippets(Ctrl+F9) - to compile the snippets in the experiment
compile Snippet (F9) - for compiling a particular code snippet box - F9.
close snippet
close all open Snippets
save current snippet
load current snippet

Figure 6: Possible actions from the snippets option on the main menu.

Actions Menu ¶

This menu refers to particular run actions such as

run preview(F5) - Run preview is useful in the situation where the experiment designer has added an extra "operator screen" to be seen by the experimenter, but not by the participant. When working on a single monitor, both windows will be visible using the Run Preview option.
run experiment(Ctrl+F5)

The user can look at and export statistics and any reported data using options such as

save last report,
exporting to excel
open run history
open run log.
Users have to specify (using code) which data should be made available for export, and will be discussed in more detail in the code section.

Help ¶

This menu is the last but not the least. It contains the link to

the online wiki(F1), where you can get information about panels, element, snippets and other program concepts
program visit card, where you can see current version number, appearing after click on About button.