I am evaluating ways to generate charts similar to the following. Would graphviz with subplots be an appropriate approach, or is there a better way? Not even sure what to look for in a web search right now.
Would like to show a WBS in tree form across the top, an Organizational Structure in tree form on the left side and then, where appropriate, control account designations in the cells that correspond to intersecting leaf nodes.
I don't think the automatic layouts in the GraphViz package can help you here, alone. While at the top and at the right side the graph does look like a regular tree structure which should be easily doable with the "dot" hierarchical style, the difficult part would be to get the matrix style in the center of the graph or more specifically merging the two tree layouts in the matrix.
Even with a more sophisticated diagramming and layout library, this kind of layout would require some manual configuration and extra coding (which nodes belong to the top and right hand side, which ones belong to the "matrix" part, etc.).
If you try yFiles, you would need to combine two instances of the TreeLayout, one GenericPartitionGridStage combined with a LayoutMultiplexer, one TabularLayout and a StraightLineRouter or use a custom "LayoutStage" for the simple "matrix part". Doable and feasible, but certainly not a simple task.
Full disclosure: I work for the company that creates the above mentioned graph layout library. I do not represent my employer here on SO, though. Thoughts and comments are my own.
Related
I was assigned the task to rewrite our home-made templates with Perl Template Toolkit.
Our templates have the possibility to extract a fragment of the template (and then make HTML from it) instead of using the entire template.
How to do it with Template Toolkit?
The best solution I came with is the following:
Let we have a template x.html with fragment A.
The fragment should be extracted into new file. (I am to name it like x/A.html for consistency.) In the original template x.html it should be replaced with [% INCLUDE 'x/A.html' %]. So I could be able to use either the entire template x.html or its fragment x/A.html. Probably we may have several levels of inclusion like x/A/B.html.
Are there other ways to do it? (I don't like to idea to split it in subdirectories as described above, but haven't come up with a better solution.)
Are you asking whether there's a better way to extract the fragment from the parent template?
(Answer is: no, that's probably the best way.)
Or are you asking is there a better way to organize the extracted fragements?
(Answer is: no real best answer, everywhere will have their own house style - you aren't going to go too far wrong by picking any convention.)
Most common conventions for naming I've seen are subdirectories x/A.html and prefixes x_A.html. Whether you use the name of the parent template for x or you choose to group by functionality as simbabque suggested is another matter of taste: grouping by functionality scales better on larger and more complicated layouts where you have a great deal of reuse of components, but grouping by use case is conceptually simpler in smaller use cases with little or no component reuse.
The title pretty much says it. What I really want is a layer mode that takes the alpha channel of the one below it and in all other respects behaves the same. The general question seems worth asking.
I'm skimming the docs, and it seems like layer modes are a fixed enum, but I wan't to be sure there isn't something I'm overlooking. I'll also take any alternative suggestions.
Thanks.
No - it is not possible to add new layer modes but for including your own modes inside GIMP source code.
However, layers are a bit more generic now, since they can be written as a GEGL operation - I'd have to check the source, but all that is needed is probably to write the proper GEGL operation (which is easy to derive from the other layer modes), and add the new operation to the enums. The big drawback of this approach as compared to plug-ins is that you can't share the layer mode with other GIMP users, and even worse: the XCF files you create with your custom mode will only be "readable" in your modified copy of GIMP.
An workaround is to write a plug-in that creates a new layer from two underlying layers, combining them as you like. You'd have to invoke it manually each time you updated each layer. You'd have to use Python-fu, instead of script-fu,a s the later does not give one access to pixel values.
For the simple case you describe, though, it seems like a sequence of "alpha-to-selection",
"selection-to-channel", "copy", "add-layer-mask", "paste" can do what you want without a need to copy pixels around in a high level language.
Are there any tools which diff hierarchies?
IE, consider the following hierarchy:
A has child B.
B has child C.
which is compared to:
A has child B.
A has child C.
I would like a tool that shows that C has moved from a child of B to a child of A. Do any such utilities exist? If there are no specific tools, I'm not opposed to writing my own, so what are some good algorithms which are applicable to this problem?
A great general resource for diffing hierarchies (not specifically XML, HTML, etc) is the Hierarchical-Diff github project based on a bit of Dartmouth research. They have a pretty extensive list of related work ranging from XML diffing, to configuration file diffing to HTML diffing.
In general, actually performing diffs/patches on tree structures is a fairly well-solved problem, but displaying those diffs in a manner that makes sense to humans is still the wild west. That's double true when your data structure already has some semantic meaning like with HTML.
You might consider our SmartDifferencer tools.
These tools compare computer source code files in a diff-like way. Unlike diff, which is line oriented, these tools see changes according to code structure (variable name, expression, statement, block, function, class, etc.) as plausible edits ("move, insert, delete, replace, copy, rename"), producing answers that makes sense to programmers.
These computer source codes have exactly the "hierarchy" structure you are suggesting; the various constructs nest. Specifically to your topic, typically code blocks can nest inside code blocks. The SmartDifferencer tools use target-language accurate parsers to "deconstruct" the source text into these hierarchical entities. We have a Smart Differencer for XML in which you can obviously write nested tags.
The answer isn't reported as "Nth child of M has moved" although it is actually computed that way, by operating on the parse trees produced by the parsers. Rather it is reported as "code fragment of type at line x col y to line a col b has moved/..."
The answer my good sir is: Depth-first search, also known as Depth-first traversal. You might find some use of the Visitor pattern.
You can't swing a dead cat without hitting some sort of implementation for this when dealing with comparing XML trees. Take a gander at diffxml for an example.
I search for an timeline graph for version control systems (like git, svn, cvs, ...) with its creation dates, ancestors and versions. I've found nothing like that.
If there is no such graph, what tool can I use to create such graphs like this or this?
Edit: I've made one for myself: https://aaron-fischer.net/zed
I'd recommend that you look into:
graphviz, for visualizing graphs, and which has a variety of incarnations. First choice, very flexible language that should let you do what you want with a little programming to automate generating the graphs. (Including things like the dotted lines from your first example.
igraph, which is a library for R, Python, etc for working with
(and visualizing) graphs.
cytoscape, network (in the graph theory) analysis.
gephi, which is similar to cytoscape.
Also consider mind-mapping software like Freemind, Xmind, etc.
In all cases, these tools can display the hierarchical network that describes your data, though adding dates/times might be difficult. (Graphviz lets you place nodes exactly where you want, so you might add the time scale in another program. In any case, you'd need to do some programming to munge the actual VCS data into something graphable.)
A suitable graph for your requirement is called Sankey chart.
It is usually used to describe flow and transitions. It can be adapted to show source control revisions. You can use the width of the line to present the number of line codes changed, and colors to present different release version etc.
Another nice implementation for this is evolines.
Another option that is a bit simpler is using a SpaceTree like the one InfoViz (http://thejit.org/). Check their demo below:
http://thejit.org/static/v20/Jit/Examples/Spacetree/example1.html
This is a general design question not relating to any language. I'm a bit torn between going for minimum code or optimum organization.
I'll use my current project as an example. I have a bunch of tabs on a form that perform different functions. Lets say Tab 1 reads in a file with a specific layout, tab 2 exports a file to a specific location, etc. The problem I'm running into now is that I need these tabs to do something slightly different based on the contents of a variable. If it contains a 1 I may need to use Layout A and perform some extra concatenation, if it contains a 2 I may need to use Layout B and do no concatenation but add two integer fields, etc. There could be 10+ codes that I will be looking at.
Is it more preferable to create an individual path for each code early on, or attempt to create a single path that branches out only when absolutely required.
Creating an individual path for each code would allow my code to be extremely easy to follow at a glance, which in turn will help me out later on down the road when debugging or making changes. The downside to this is that I will increase the amount of code written by calling some of the same functions in multiple places (for example, steps 3, 5, and 9 for every single code may be exactly the same.
Creating a single path that would branch out only when required will be a bit messier and more difficult to follow at a glance, but I would create less code by placing conditionals only at steps that are unique.
I realize that this may be a case-by-case decision, but in general, if you were handed a previously built program to work on, which would you prefer?
Edit: I've drawn some simple images to help express it. Codes 1/2/3 are the variables and the lines under them represent the paths they would take. All of these steps need to be performed in a linear chronological fashion, so there would be a function to essentially just call other functions in the proper order.
Different Paths
Single Path
Creating a single path that would
branch out only when required will be
a bit messier and more difficult to
follow at a glance, but I would create
less code by placing conditionals only
at steps that are unique.
Im not buying this statement. There is a level of finesse when deciding when to write new functions. Functions should be as simple and reusable as possible (but no simpler). The correct answer is almost never 'one big file that does a lot of branching'.
Less LOC (lines of code) should not be the goal. Readability and maintainability should be the goal. When you create functions, the names should be self documenting. If you have a large block of code, it is good to do something like
function doSomethingComplicated() {
stepOne();
stepTwo();
// and so on
}
where the function names are self documenting. Not only will the code be more readable, you will make it easier to unit test each segment of the code in isolation.
For the case where you will have a lot of methods that call the same exact methods, you can use good OO design and design patterns to minimize the number of functions that do the same thing. This is in reference to your statement "The downside to this is that I will increase the amount of code written by calling some of the same functions in multiple places (for example, steps 3, 5, and 9 for every single code may be exactly the same."
The biggest danger in starting with one big block of code is that it will never actually get refactored into smaller units. Just start down the right path to begin with....
EDIT --
for your picture, I would create a base-class with all of the common methods that are used. The base class would be abstract, with an abstract method. Subclasses would implement the abstract method and use the common functions they need. Of course, replace 'abstract' with whatever your language of choice provides.
You should always err on the side of generalization, with the only exception being early prototyping (where throughput of generating working stuff is majorly impacted by designing correct abstractions/generalizations). having said that, you should NEVER leave that mess of non-generalized cloned branches past the early prototype stage, as it leads to messy hard to maintain code (if you are doing almost the same thing 3 different times, and need to change that thing, you're almost sure to forget to change 1 out of 3).
Again it's hard to specifically answer such an open ended question, but I believe you don't have to sacrifice one for the other.
OOP techniques solves this issue by allowing you to encapsulate the reusable portions of your code and generate child classes to handle object specific behaviors.
Personally I think you might (if possible by your API) create inherited forms, create them on fly on master form (with tabs), pass agruments and embed in tab container.
When to inherit form and when to decide to use arguments (code) to show/hide/add/remove functionality is up to you, yet master form should contain only decisions and argument passing and embeddable forms just plain functionality - this way you can separate organisation from implementation.