Automating User Interfaces for a Multi-way Dataflow Constraint System

Abstract

A scriptable User Interface (UI) can be set to record the user’s actions into a script, and then play that recorded script back over different data. The purpose is to automate oft-occurring use patterns. Though such automation is useful, especially for advanced users of particular software systems, scriptable UIs are not common. We conjecture that the implementation cost of such features is too high for them to become common. The project develops a generic approach for scripting where this feature could be packaged into a library, to be reused by different UIs. In this approach, the effort needed to implement scripting is considerably reduced. The context for this thesis is the use of multi-way dataflow constraint systems in Graphical User Interface (GUI) programming. Such systems can represent the state of a GUI in a concise and well-structured manner. These state representations can be inspected and manipulated programmatically, which is what we exploit for generic script- ing too. Concretely, we build scripting support for the HotDrink GUI framework that is based on multi-way dataflow constraint systems and provides a mechanism for structural manipulation of GUI elements.