Data tree colouring/structuring

[MJCliffe]

Being able to set the colour of a compound on the data tree would be very useful, to help differentiate different collections or families of compounds from one another.

Could also use symbols other than circles for items too.

[jdbocarsly]

Hey @MJCliffe, I'm actually working on a PR that improves performance and adds more options to make the graph more useful. Could you describe a bit more how the coloring by compound would ideally work?

[MJCliffe]

Yeah sure: this is one of my students' requests.

At the moment, every compound has the same colour (blue) and every collection of compound has the same colour (purple) (logged stock chemicals are green). It would be good to be able to change the colours so that compounds in a particular collection all have the same colour, and different collections of compounds could have different colours.

If samples reagents and collections had different shapes (e.g. triangle, star) that would allow the current information to be retained

[jdbocarsly]

That's a good suggestion. How would you deal with samples that are in multiple collections, or no collections at all?

I'm adding in some more features for customizing the graph now, but also the ability to export the graph formats that can be opened in programs like gephi or cytoscape for more customized visualization and analysis.

[PeterKraus]

I like the above ideas. Perhaps collections could be indicated by the edge colour as opposed to the fill colour, and perhaps also be separately togglable, but that might be me getting carried away.

One of our users raised the query about (optionally) using the Name of the object instead of the object ID (or refcode) in the viewer, as the IDs are harder to remember when randomly generated.

[ml-evs]

@jdbocarsly do you have a screenshot of what you've done in #813? Maybe we could some of these options there (I always imagined we'd add a hover box with more info at some point)

[jdbocarsly]

Sure, here are the current options:

@PeterKraus , good ideas -- I had already added the ability to switch to showing the names for starting materials, but can add a separate checkbox for samples.

I agree with @ml-evs that it would be nice to have more info show up on hover or click, as well as more configuration. I'll try to get this PR to a good stopping point soon so that it can be merged, and we can continue to iterate on the UI in the future. Beyond the configuration, the major upgrade in the current PR is that the graph becomes much faster and easier to work with :)