icat usage display

[mantid-builder]

Original Reporter: Jay Rainey

In an email Owen noted that:

It be a useful feature in MantidPlot to have a green light feature for ICAT usage? That way you could determine whether ICAT could be used very easily. There are many issues that could affect this on both the server and client side. A help button next to it which might help you to trouble shoot issues and report problems would be great.

I have partially addressed this by adding significantly better error messages for uploading/downloading in http://trac.mantidproject.org/mantid/ticket/8727. I now use error messages that the IDS returns when an error occurs. For example, if a file already exists when publishing the user gets an informative message to indicate this, a long with the related filename/ID of the file being published.

To implement this I will need to create a few small labels on the Search and Publish interfaces that indicate the server status (up = green & down = red).

=== ICAT search usage ===

1. Obtain the status of the ICAT server using getAPIVersion().
2. If a version is returned then ICAT server is alive. Set the label to green. Otherwise, set the label to red and create a button that lets users report the problem to the Mantid team.
3. Create a small label on the Search GUI that changes in color to shows the user ICAT usage. For example:

  ICAT Status: {small colored label} (When user hovers display detailed usage message)

=== IDS publishing usage ===

1. Perform ids.ping to obtain the status of the server (up/down).

2. Add and update a label as described above.

   Keywords: ICAT

[mantid-builder]

This issue was originally trac ticket 8740