| Dan:
Good question. I've thought alot about this kind of issue in the past.
Today's version of the IMPM is restricted to navigating between entities
on the basis of the containment (parent-child) relationships inherent in
the DECmcc product. We can zoom into an entity to see its children and
we can look up from a child to see its parent. After running the IMPM for
just a few minutes you will be familiar with these operations.
What we need to do in the future is to allow the user to navigate between
entities based on non-containment relationships. The alarms example you
mentioned is one of the best examples of how we could use this new
capability.
The relationship between an alarm rule entity and another entity (node,
bridge, etc.) is not parent-child. I don't want to get into all of the
technical reasons why this is so. I like to call this relationship the
"detects-faults-in" relationship because the alarm rule "detects-faults-in"
another entity.
DECmcc needs to maintain and manipulate these kinds of relationships in
a USER_FRIENDLY way so that we can provide more powerful capabilities like
what you have suggested. A package like Hypercard is a good example of the
powerful user interface that is possible when this kind of capability is
implemented.
I hope we can provide this kind of capability in future versions of DECmcc.
- Jerry
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