Documentation - Customizing and Editing Process Details

(Note: This is part of the early draft for the documentation of ALExSIM-USAS, to give the basic idea and understanding about ALExSIM-USAS and its components/sections. This draft may go through more updates. Latest update - 31 Jan 2020)

Customize Process Details

This section is to allow the user to edit and prepare the process details that will become the input data for the scheduling algorithm simulation. 

Figure 1 below shows a snapshot of this section, which displays a table that appears after the user click the Generate random values button. 

Figure 1: Process details that appear in Customize Process Details section

The table for the process details will only appear if the user successfully performed one of the following actions in the Process Generation / Setup section (read about Process Generation / Setup for more explanation):

• click the Generate random values button (create process details using generated random values)
• click the Generate empty fields button (create process details by preparing empty table)
• click the Import data button (create process details by loading data from existing data file)

Editing the process details

User can edit any process detail (except the ID) by double-clicking the respective cell. For example in Figure 1, if the user wants to change the arrival time for process A to become 0 (instead of 9), user can just double-click on the number 9 and change it into 0. 

The editing of the table will only accept integer value. Other type of data like alphabets or floating point number is not allowed. So if user type or enter such data, it will be invalid, highlighted in red and editing will be still active.

Exporting the process details into file

User can also export or save the process details into a file using the Export data button. 

The exported data will be saved in a specially-formatted text file with the extension *.ptd. Once the data is saved, user can later reload the data from the file using the Import data button in the Process Generation / Setup section. 

ALExSIM-USAS actually implements the *.ptd format using a CSV-style (comma separated values) format. Since it is just a simple text file, the exported file can be opened using any text editor. This means user can edit the exported data in a text editor, but must ensure that formatting is maintained. (If the user tries to load data from a file with corrupted or invalid or unknown format, an error message will be displayed and the data can't be reloaded.)

Also the exported data can be imported into spreadsheet application that able to load data from CSV file. This means any exported file can be imported using application like MS-Excel or OpenOffice Calc. 

That's all about the section. Next i will explain about the next step, which is about Selecting the Scheduling Algorithms section.