Option to open windows in 'standalone' mode

[rjwills28]

Currently Phoebus supports opening new screens (BOB files) in new windows. These new windows are tied to the main window in that they adopt the same settings, i.e. display tabs, display toolbar.

At Diamond, a lot of our CS-Studio screens make use of the CS-Studio standalone mode where screens display in a separate windows with no other features other than a title bar with the minimize, maximize and close button, e.g.:

It would be very useful if we could replicate this same sort of look in Phoebus.

I can see from the code that the 'standalone' target is still available on an ActionButton and that there are some deprecated method stubs that simply open the screen as a new window. For example see OpenDisplayAction and ToolkitRepresentaton. Presumably this is just there at the moment to support OPI->BOB conversions that reference 'standalone'.

I have had a quick play myself at leveraging these existing methods and implementing a way of opening standalone windows, which basically involves ensuring the toolbar and tabs do not show and that they also are not displayed when enabled from the main window options.

To minimize impact on other users we would suggest introducing some Phoebus preferences that enable the use of this standalone window mode and otherwise ignores it and maintains the current behaviour of just opening as a new window with a toolbar and tabs configured as standard.

We wanted to gauge whether the community would be open to having this additional feature if we were to spend some time properly developing the standalone window implementation?

[rjwills28]

This was discussed in a CSS collaboration meeting and people seemed open to the idea of implementing support for standalone windows as long as it did not compromise the current Phoebus behavior.

I have come up with an implementation for the standalone window model which:

• Defines a standalone window as one that dos not display the toolbar or tabs. Toggling these on/off from the Phoebus main menu has no affect on a standalone window.
• Allows you to open displays from an action as a standalone window, including this option in the editor interface.
• Load standalone windows from mementos.
• Open displays in the standalone window mode from the console.

In addition, it does not make sense to have other applications open in the same active window as the standalone window as we have removed the tabs. To replicate CS-Studio behavior we suggest that when right-clicking and opening another app from a standalone window (e.g. the data browser, probe etc), this opens the app in the 'main' Phoebus window and not the last active one.
This has been discussed in #3598. In our implementation, any app launched from a standalone window will open in the main Phoebus browser. We have also added a preference which would allow users to configure Phoebus to open any app launched from a 'regular' detached/tabbed display in the main window as well, with the default behavior left as is.

This implementation is available in the branch: https://github.com/rjwills28/phoebus/tree/standalone_windows with the 'compare' here.

We would very much appreciate any feedback on this implementation so that we can move it forward and get this feature merged.

[epicDirk]

We have the same problem at ESS Lund.

Our operators use "New Window" (popup) to show detail views for equipment from the overview displays. The problem is that from inside a popup there is no possibility to navigate back to the main Phoebus window:

Replace changes the content inside the popup (and does not resize the popup automatically)
New Tab opens a new tab inside the popup
New Window opens another popup window on top
During shifts this creates many open windows and the operators lose the overview which window is which. Especially in stressful situations this is a real problem.

What we would like to have: An option on the "Open Display" action (for example a checkbox "Open in main window") so that a button inside a popup can open a .bob file in the main Phoebus window instead of the popup. This way display designers can build popup detail views where the navigation goes back to the main window.