138 Chapter 6: Creating a Visualization
Unregistering a Visualization Type iTool Developer’s Guide
Unregistering a Visualization Type
If you are creating a new iTool from an existing iTool class, you may want to remove
a visualization type registered with the existing class from your new tool. This can be
useful if you have an iTool class that implements all of the functionality you need, but
which registers a visualization type you don’t want included in your iTool. Rather
than recreating the iTool class to remove the visualization type, you could create your
new iTool class in such a way that it inherits from the existing iTool class, but
unregisters the unwanted visualization.
Unregister a visualization type by calling the IDLitTool::UnregisterVisualization
method in the Init method of your iTool class:
self->UnregisterVisualization,
identifier
where identifier is the string name used when registering the visualization.
For example, suppose you are creating a new iTool that subclasses from the standard
iSurface tool, which is defined by the IDLitToolSurface class. If you wanted your
new tool to behave just like the iSurface tool, with the exception that it would not
handle 2D plot visualizations, you could include the following method call in your
iTool’s Init method:
self->UnregisterVisualization, 'Plot'
Finding the Identifier String
To find the string used as the identifier parameter to the UnregisterVisualization
method, you can inspect the class file that registers the visualization (if the
visualization is registered by a user-created class), or use the FindIdentifiers method
of the IDLitTool object to generate a list of registered visualizations. (Standard iTool
visualization types are pre-registered within the iTool framework.)
If the visualization is registered in a user-created class, you could inspect the class
definition file to find a call to the RegisterVisualization method, which looks
something like this:
self->RegisterVisualization, 'Plot', 'IDLitVisPlot', $
ICON = 'plot'
The first argument to the RegisterVisualization method ('Plot') is the string name
of the visualization type.
Alternatively, to generate a list of relative identifiers for all visualizations registered
with the current tool, use the following statements:
void = ITGETCURRENT(TOOL=oTool)
