Revisit XS Viewer and GCD integration

[philipbaileynar]

Our initial attempt at loosely coupling the GCD and XS Viewer software was a successful proof of concept. We can perform linear extractions in GCD and get the resultant data into an XS Viewer database where it can be displayed. this work workflow does, however, produces some quirks:

• Each export produces a new database. This was a precautionary approach given that it's safer to produce a clean database each time, rather than attempt to match-up the contents of the XS Viewer database with the corresponding items in a GCD project.
• It's odd that the only way to get at the XS Viewer from GCD is to produce a new export database! There needs to either be:
  • Dedicated menu option for opening the XS Viewer with the last export DB
  • Display the list (or perhaps just the latest) export DB as a node in the GCD project tree, that when clicked launches the XS Viewer software.

Discussion

Do we need to produce a new export database each time? Perhaps each time that a linear extraction is performed, the newly generated extraction is add to the one and only export database right there and then. That way the export database is always up to date and can simply be accessed from anywhere in the GCD project to view relevant items. This does present some problems:

• The GCD currently does not contain any logic on how to create an XS Viewer database or insert linear extractions (see Background section below).
• What happens when the user deletes a linear extraction in the GCD? How will GCD remove it from the export database?

Background

Remember that GCD knows nothing about the XS Viewer or the concept of databases etc. The way the coupling currently works is that the GCD simply launches the XS Viewer software with the path to the GCD project as the command line argument. The XS Viewer sees that the path is a GCD project (and not an XS Viewer database) and then performs all the necessary logic to import any linear extractions that it finds.