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First contact with Graphreg

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4:26 am
February 4, 2011

PhiLho

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A message I sent via "Contact Us" form, but it was truncated, so I repost it here.

First note: your forum is quite empty, probably because the Register page is empty (no visible form in Firefox & Chrome). [Now fixed, that's why I can post here!]

Thus I give feedback by private channel… [Making it public as it is of general interest.]

I just found out Graphrex via the Eclipse Marketplace, in the new items category.

I must say I am impressed.

I tested a number of regex testers (for Windows), from the excellent Regex Coach (using a private Lisp engine) to the decent PcreWorkbench and some others (jregexptester on the Java side), but your is truly one of the best!

I tested it with a simple expression at first, and it was nice.

I tested it with a more complex expression (the last one in my Regular Expressions Tutorial page, against a long list of correct and incorrect dates) and it behaved nicely, once I understood I cannot set flags externally, but I have to start my expression with (?x).

Some issues I found with my quick test:

a) The combo box can widden when we open the drop part, but the close button is then below the next graphical part (an arrow), making hard to close it. Simple test: (?<=\t)[A-Z]{3}-\d{2}

b) When the expression is in a capture group, and the combo box is at the bottom of the group, the drop part is cut by the enclosing capture block. We have scrollbars, but they are nearly unusable (too small) and this is generally not nice.

c) I changed an expression, but not saved the new one, as I wanted to revert to the original one. Ctrl+Z managed to restore the old expression, but Eclipse was not responding just after! (using 50% of CPU). I had to kill it.

d) I also had Eclipse to freeze after playing with the graphical representation of a) (trying to close the combo – had some graphical glitches, like the count disappearing from its box, then freeze at 50% of CPU).

e) I think Test Text content should be linked to the current expression: we use different expressions on different data, in general.

f) I expected to have colored backgrounds behind the matching parts of test text. Perhaps the Eclipse editor doesn't allow this? The squiggly lines are disconcerting at first, as we are used to see them to mark errors/problems. Not a major problem, but worth mentioning.

g) It would be nice if you could highlight the path of the selected matching expression in the graph. Currently, we see that only if we have captures.

h) In the tree, if we have a capture in a path but that path is folded, we cannot know which path has the capture. I also have some line noise below some nodes (I can send a screenshot if you want).

i) I added a view of Graphrex in the bottom area (where I have Console, Call Hierarchy and similar), but it is not usable before creating a new Graphrex document. It might be nice to be able to just quickly type/paste an expression and test it, without graphical part, without new document added to the project, etc.

j) This view is persistent. Very persistent! I can get rid of the tab by clicking on the close cross, but it reappears when I switch to another (Java) file or even to another view in the same area! Annoying.

That's all for today, the list of issues is a bit long, which is normal for a pre-1.0 version, but as I wrote, you made an excellent job overall. Congratulations!

1:27 pm
April 11, 2011

Alan

Admin

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Thanks for your comments, Phil. We appreciate the chance to improve Graphrex. Thanks also for your positive remarks.

Version 0.5 (which is undergoing final testing) will fix many of the problems you had, though not all. Here I'm taking the chance to say what we have fixed and what we plan to do about others:

(a) Over-written combo boxes: We re-wrote the graphics code in version 0.5 to change the z-order so that a combo box over-writes the following node instead of the other way around. Now when you open a combo box that gets wider its close button will no longer be covered up by the following node. We also cleaned up the drawing of the connecting lines so that they are always underneath the nodes and don't get in the way.

(b) Opening a combo box within a group node: Now with version 0.5 when you open a combo box within a group node the node will automatically get bigger so that the combo box is not cut off. When you close the combo box the capture group node gets smaller again. As before, you can use the Arrange action to refresh the layout of the whole diagram after opening or closing a combo box. You won't see so many of those annoying scroll bars!

(c) Undo causing infinite loop: We have made some changes in 0.5 that — as a side effect — seem to have eliminated this bug. Let us know if it happens again.

(d) Other infinite loop issues in graphics: We have done some re-writing of the graphics code so that now it conforms to the Model-View-Controller pattern and our tests show that this has fixed the problems with infinite loops. Let us know if that is not the case!

(e) Test text should be specific to a given regular expression: We agree, but we have postponed this change to a release after version 0.5.

(f) Matched text highlighted by squiggly underlines: We will make the kind of highlight a Preference, but in a future release, i.e. after 0.5.

(g) Highlighting the matched path within the regex: Again, we plan to introduce function like this in later releases.

(h) Showing which path in an Alternatives has matched in the outline view: We agree that this function is needed but we have not been able to include it in version 0.5. As a work around you can use the diagram to select a capture group on the relevant path, which will open the outline view to show that capture group and thus also the rest of the path.

(i) Use the Regex View without opening a diagram: We can see that this would be useful, but we need to think more about how to make it clear to users when and how to link to an editor. Having two modes — with editor and without — is generally a bad thing in a UI and needs careful thought.

(j) Regex view is persistent — very persistent: In version 0.5 we have fixed this bug, which was caused by an error on our code that handled view switching events coming from Eclipse.

Thanks again for your comments. Please stay tuned for version 0.5 and let us know what you think.

Alan

Croton Research Development

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