dnetview is based on the design-pattern Model, View, Controller. We create a logical seperation between the underlying data structure or Model; the ui rendering aspect which is the View; and the Controller or game engine that makes everything run.

Version 0.1

The current data structure or model of dnetview is this:

Model

    Mutex<HashSet<NodeId>>
    Mutex<HashMap<NodeId, NodeInfo>>

View

View is a copy of the model data with additional parameters. We remove the Mutex and add 'ListState' and 'Index' that allow us to use IdList and InfoList as lists.

    IdList {
        ListState,
        HashSet<NodeId>
    }
    InfoList {
        Index,
        HashMap<NodeId, NodeInfo>
    }

Controller

Inside our main function we create two parallel threads: run_rpc and render.

Parallel::new() {
    run_rpc(model)
    render(model)
}

run_rpc polls the rpc every 2 seconds. This function updates the underlying model which is protected by mutexes, and detaches in the background.

render takes the latest model data and updates the view in a loop.

loop {
    view = model.update()
    }

Version 0.2:

In the first version, we could scroll the list of connected nodes and also scroll a corresponding list of NodeInfo. In the lastest version, the model is made more generic to allow for many types of selectable objects: NodeInfo, SessionInfo, and ConnectInfo.

Model

The model has 3 types of SelectableObjects which are organized around an enum:

enum SelectableObject {
    Node(NodeInfo)
    Session(SessionInfo)
    Connect(ConnectInfo)
}

We copy these values into a Vec to use them around the program.

View

View is a copy of model without mutex's and with an index that allows the objects to be scrollable lists. We also create a function called render() that draws each window.

NodeInfo.render()
SessionInfo.render()
ConnectInfo.render()

Controller

Like the previous version, we have two functions that run in parallel: run_rpc() and render(). In run_rpc, we poll the rpc and write the new values to the model:

    info = NodeInfo::new()...
    session = SessionInfo::new()...
    connection = ConnectInfo::new()...
    model_vec.push(info, session, connection)

We then continuously update the view with the new data from the model.

loop {
    view = model.update()
}