Suggestion: adding a "hidden" override attribute.

[Arnith]

Hello,

The following could be very useful:
in a perspective it's possible to change a little bit the behavior of a resource using the "overrides". We can only change the parent element or the scale of an element. What it could be very useful, is to decide if a resource (and it's relations links) has to be hidden or not.

For example, it could be possible to reuse a perspective that describe all the relations and display all the resources, and create new smaller ones that extend the original one and just choose what you want to display or not.

Thank you !

[billy-pilger]

(I've merged this discussion with https://github.com/orgs/ilograph/discussions/36 since they raise the same issues).

"Hiding" in perspectives (or slides) has been requested a few times over the years, and I've even experimented with some implementations. The roadblock I've run into is what it means to hide a resource.

Consider the below diagram:

Hiding resources A, B, E, or F is pretty clear I think, since they are "leaf" nodes at the edges of the screen.

What it means to hide C or D isn't as clear to me. If hiding C, should A and B also be pruned? They don't have relations to resources other than C, after all.

But what if A did have other relations, like in this example:

If the implementation is "remove all relations with C", then diagram layouts could be drastically altered:

The alternative is a "recursive" style pruning like so, which results in Q disappearing also:

Even this isn't clear cut, since it isn't obvious which direction (left or right) the pruning should go in. Pruning in both directions would result in an empty diagram, in this case.

I think the root of the issue is that relation diagrams are defined by relations, so the natural way to handle this would be to hide relations instead of resources. That would give diagram authors control over all of the above. The problem is finding a way to do that syntactically.

Anyway, I'm eager to hear other's thoughts.

[max-wolf-convotis]

Hi

As you said hiding relations is semantically pretty clear.
Even so this might require various relations to hide in order to completely hide a resource, the user would have full control.
However it would require a relationID (which might be a useful concept anyway).

For me the most logical extension of that approach to resources, would be to hide all relations referenced by the resource (from/to/via).
That would result in the third of your diagrams above.

I wouldn't go for any recursive pruning.

What also has to be clarified, is the hierarchy (resource-tree/context/overrides).
I would think, that sub-resources should also be hidden.

Regards, Max

[billy-pilger]

What also has to be clarified, is the hierarchy (resource-tree/context/overrides).
I would think, that sub-resources should also be hidden.

I would think so too, but the hierarchy is dynamic because of Contexts. If the rule is sub-resources are hidden, then those sub-resources would be hidden or not depending on the Context. My concern is this would be hard to understand.

Though I merged the discussion on hiding resources in walkthrough slides, that may have been premature since slides don't have this issue (contexts are declared in walkthrough slides).

Other thoughts?

[billy-pilger]

This isn't exactly implemented as such, but you can now (as of 2.2.9) override the detail level of resources in perspectives. Especially when combined with scale overrides, this is a way to de-emphasize resources without outright hiding them (which raises issues discussed above).