The manager panel consists of the info panel, a message line and the XGUI menu. The panel is created at initialization time. The callback functions in the file ui_mainProcs.c create all the windows and the procedure ui_printMessage() creates messages in the panel. SNNS-XGUI is left by pressing the QUIT button with the function ui_quit().
If multiple displays are used, all status information is best kept in one window. To display the information in different windows would waste space on the displays. Therefore this information is collected in the manager panel.
Functions, which change a value displayed in the manager panel have to use the routine ui_stat_displayStatus to updated the panel. The function ui_stat_displayStatus displays the other status information with the help of the variables ui_sel_numberOfSelectedItems, ui_key_flags, currentLayer and ui_currentDisplayPtr. The scanning position is pased on as a parameter. To avoid flickering, this function is called only when there is a change in information (i.e. it is not called if the mouse is dragged over the display without changing the scanning position).
Sometimes the displayed attributes have to be checked for validity. The function ui_info_anyUnitSelected() checks whether the displayed source and target really exist. The function ui_info_makeUnitInfoPanelConsistent() updates the panel, if units or sites have been erased. It is also called by several functions of the action module.
The Info panel is the most complex of SNNS-XGUI. To ease access to the widgets of the source and target units, they are accumulated in structures ( ui_targetWidgets, ui_sourceWidgets, ui_linkWidgets). This was used in programming the routines in ui_infoProcs.c. Each attribute is also stored in a corresponding attribute structure ( ui_targetUnit, ui_sourceUnit, ui_link).