Gather information about UI gestures

Primary purpose of this module is collect information about the user actions that take place in the running NetBeans based application.

The info about various UI events in the system is collected thru listening on log records send to Logger.getLogger("org.netbeans.ui") . Any code in the system can get instance of this logger or any child logger and send useful informations to it. At the end of the session the last few hundereds events is taken and displayed to the user for further processing.

Presenting usage statistics

Important part of the behaviour of this module is the ability to cooperate with information analyzing tools and present their results. This is done thru special HTTP contracts, where the module reads and understands various server responses and is able to open browser after submitting data to analysis.

There is a key in the org.netbeans.modules.uihandler.Bundle that specifies the location of the page on a server one shall query and display to the user when the module is about the submit data for analysis. The page pointed by WELCOME_URL can contain any XHTML text, but it also should contain a <form/> tag that defines <input type="hidden" name="submit" value="localizedName"/>. The localizedName is then going to be used for a button for the dialog displaying the summary. When this button is invoked, the "action" URL is then feed with data from the UI logs. The server is then supposed to process the data, create some analytics pages and return them back to the client. If the returned page contains tag like <meta http-equiv='Refresh' content='3; URL=somepage'> an (external) browser is opened with the specified URL and the user can then interact directly with the server, thru pages it serves. For testing purposes one can specify different URL for upload of files, by setting org.netbeans.modules.uihandler.Submit property when invoking NetBeans.

Adding own UI gestures

The base module is in fact just an infrastructure which collects data about UI gestures, but the actual gestures need to be delivered to it somehow. Here is the description of the ways how one can extend own modules to cooperate with this UI gestures infrastructure.

To feed own data about special UI gestures one can just create own Logger.getLogger("org.netbeans.ui.ownname") and send own log records to it. The format of the log messages shall follow the one described by the structured logging document, e.g. the LogRecord shall have associated ResourceBundle and the record's getMessage shall point to a key in that bundle. there is an extension to the regular formatting done by the logging formatter that, in order to achieve nicer appearance to the user, allows each record to be associated with an icon. Just define MSG_KEY_ICON_BASE in the bundle associated with the LogRecord (where the MSG_KEY is the string returned by record.getMessage()) and the value is then going to be used for the Node representing the UI gesture.

Sometimes direct logging may not be possible. For example for performance data it might be meaningful to collect the information over a longer time period and only at the end output some statistics. This is supported as well. Just implement and register one of the interfaces from the API of this module and properly register them and the implementation will be called when the logger module is activated or when the user finishes the work with the application. In order to keep dependencies clean, it is strongly adviced to make modules that implement this API eager, so they get enabled as soon as the UI logger module is enabled.

These usecases are realized as described in here in provided UI specification.