Description editor

[danyill]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

As a user of OpenSCD there are various "descriptions" which are often useful to edit:

• descriptions of instantiated objects -- logical devices logical nodes, data objects, data attributes
• descriptions of ExtRefs
• preconfigured bindings (not really a description but hey!)

I happen to be interested in all three of these at the moment as part of making subscriptions work better for us:

• I want to see a matching description between an ExtRef and an FCDA in some sense
• Most IEDs seem to provide "cascadable" descriptions from LDevice > LN> DOI and display these as a concatenation, perhaps with a separator ( as IEC 61850 Configurator does)
• I would also like some ability to see/edit the preconfigured attributes (arguably not in the same editor)

Describe the solution you'd like

An editor plugin which arranges these by dataset order so I don't need to navigate the data model and the so the editor is already focussed on my use case (datasets which are already configured for use).

Requirements What are the minimal requirements you need to have for this feature wish

Suggestions for a specific user interaction

I have a mock-up for further discussion/refinement:

Excalidraw

[danyill]

It's difficult to know what's useful to the community vs. what's useful for me and my needs -- but it's super easy with OpenSCD core to get a straightforward need met and so an initial PoC for our internal usage and configuration is here (warning! no tests, just some hacking away this morning) in case anyone is interested.

One of the problems with my concept for it to be general and a useful feature in OpenSCD is how to treat really nested LN structures, e.g. LDevice > LN > DOI > SDI > SDI > SDI > DAI > DAI > DAI but this is rarely encountered in practice. I've not yet found a data model with two SDIs nested (but it will happen eventually). Fixed!

Also it's not how/whether a plugin should also look at the LNodeTypes>DO>DOType>SDO> etc. and DAType>BDA[type=Struct]>DAType>BDA[type=Struct]>DAType... - for now I'm thinking this plugin only deals with instantiated structures but this is an artificial distinction (maybe)

[danyill]

We discussed last week and agreed that the first part of this plugin was general purpose and a worthy contribution.

However it was felt data attributes shoudl also be added.

Jakob noted that the standard does not appear to envisage an SCT tool modifying the pXX attributes so this would be excluded.

(NB: I feel the standard may not have considered this widely enough because pXX types are an integral part of considering the use of a template in the context of other IEDs which is a primary use case for an SCT!)

I will tidy up/improve this editor and seek to merge it.

[danyill]

FWIW, the prototype of this is here: https://github.com/danyill/oscd-description and to try it out: https://danyill.github.io/oscd-description/index.deploy.html

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