In this latest update, ORNIS now supports element selection! This required a bit of re-thinking of how messages are handled in the front-end, but I’m quite happy with how it turned out. One of the downsides to working intermittently on a project is that one tends to run into a lot of “Wait, I’ve already solved this!”, and this update has a few of these instances. The big one was almost re-inventing “msg_tree”, essentially a nested tree data structure I created for the service interactions. The entire purpose of the msg_tree was to be a format which would allow for easier visualisation and traversal for the UI. I was annoyingly far into creating typesupport traversal functions when I had a look at the service monitor code and realised I was re-treading ground.

While I was working on it, I also updated how the messages are rendered on-screen for both Topics and Services. They’re a lot prettier now, and I think showing the branches the way I do goes a long way for presenting the message structure.

The next feature I will be adding to ORNIS will be either something theme related, or I’ll add some more improvements to the visualisation of nodes.