Organizing your algorithms

Benjamin Ducke posted an email yesterday to the SEXTANTE mailing list, pointing out the need to have some mechanism for creating your own toolbox groups and organizing algorithms, since the number of them is currently rather big due to the SAGA and GRASS interfaces. Instead of replying to his email, I have been reading the fruitful discussion that followed and implemented a first solution to that problem. And since I believe that I have done a nice work (specially considering that I have been working on this just today), I am posting this to the SEXTANTE blog to let everyone know about it. Here is what I have done:

-List of recently used algorithms. There is a group of algorithms that contains the most recently used ones and appears always at the top of the list. I might add an option to remove this group in case someone does not find it useful.



-You can arrange your algorithms as you like. Each algorithm has a provider name (Currently SEXTANTE, GRASS, Models or SAGA) and a group name. If you go to the SEXTANTE settings you will find a "configure algorithm groups" button. If you click on it the following dialog will appear:



Just change the name of the group and subgroup (the provider name and the group name) to put an algorithm on a different brach of the tree of algorithms. If you do not want an algorithm to appear, just uncheck its checkbox.

As you can see, this works even with non-native algorithms (see the SAGA label?). This is another advantage of the new architecture based on algorithm providers :-)

Groups are stored in a text file that is loaded when SEXTANTE is initialized, but I will probably implement some way of selecting your own file, so you can have several configurations. Other improvements might include sorting the algorithms table clicking on a column header or editing several algorithms in one single step. Still many things can be done, but, after all, I have just been working on that less then one full day!

All this changes have effecct both in the tollbox and in the graphical modeler.