extending Dia for process control aplication

[Alex Karev <lineum mail ru>]

Hello all!

We are dreaming of how to implement diagram drawing tool for our data acquisition and process control system. Dia and its chemistry set seems to be suited well, but needs extension to use with our dynamic objects (i/o fields, meters, analog bars+) and way to make binding for this dynamic objects with variables from database. Our dynamic objects are (will be) in form of GTK+ widgets. For now we see two major parts, for which any help and advises are welcome:

1.	We are planning to make plug-in based on chemistry set. As we understand we must mix in some way the svg based chemistry set and C coded dynamic objects with their custom options dialogs?

2.	Also we didn't get for now good idea how implement runtime format of diagrams. One straightforward way is to render static objects (boils, tubes, motors) to some pixmap format to be background for some compound widget, which will also contain dynamic object widgets.

3.	It' s also interesting how to make some additional diagram properties, for example select diagram size in pixels instead of paper formats.

Is it good example to start from? May be somebody already done something similar? What is the way to implement this using Dia API as much as possible? Or may one will advice to switch for this project to some another open application. :-)

The application is planning to run on win32 and Linux.

Alex.