Preferences
By choosing Window
/ Preferences in the Menu of the
Eclipse Application, you can set several preferences for the ADORA Tool.
Appearance
The appearance preferences of
the ADORA editor (Fig. 1) allows you to change the font
settings for the node description and the label description of
connections.
Furthermore, it's possible to change the font for the connection labels.

Fig. 1: Appearance Preferences
Empirical Testing
Fig. 2 shows the
preferences for the empirical testing plugin. This plugin uses a
paticular database for which several preferences can be set:
- The Java class name of the driver.
- The connection string (containg the type of connection and where
the database is located).
- The user of the database.
- The password for the given user.

Fig.
2:
Empirical Testing
Line Routing
The line routing preferences
(Fig. 3)
provide the possiblity to change the type of the line routing that is
used for the different type of connections in an ADORA model.
The different type of
connections are as follows:
For each connection type,
there can be either the shortest
path connection router (GEF default), the direct line router
or the orthogonal tile maze router,
which is a special way to route
lines in hierarchical decomposed models. The orthogonal tile maze
algorithm tries to find a shortest path for a rectilinear tile
path between two points A and
B where the tiles are the
horizontal spaces bounded by nodes or lines respectively.
The direct line router draws direct line from point A to point B, irrespective of any obstacles,
i.e. the routed line intersects the borders of any obstacles (nodes or
other lines) between A and B.
In contrast to the above described line routing, the shortest path connection
router
uses a shortest path algorithm for nodes that are connected between the
points A and B. Nodes or lines between A and B are recognized as obstacles and
the routing algorithm tries to find the shortest non-rectilinear
route which does
not intersect the borders of the obstacles.
The clickpoint strategy for
the
tile maze routing algorithm sets the way the anchor point for the
routed lines is determined. You can choose either the fixed click point
strategy which means that the anchor point of the line is determined by
the line, or you can choose the intersection strategy which means that
the anchor points for the lines are determined by finding the
intersection between the directly drawn line and the nodes which are
connected.
Additionally, choosing
different cost factors for crossing lines with other lines or for
drawing lines over
nodes influences the way how the line is routed.
Furthermore, you can show
for demonstration purposes the tile
structure of the tile maze routing
algorithm.

Fig. 3: Line routing
preferences.
Zoom algorithm
The zoom algorithm handles the abstraction of a sub set of zoomable
nodes (Objects, Object sets, States, and Aspect containers). For the
purpose of debugging several options can be enabled:
- Show occlusions prevented by the layout algorithm
- Show the original position of the moved components
- Show the original position of teh moved children components
- Show movement vectors
- Save model before relayouting

Fig.
4: Zoom
algorithm preferences