Feedback on DirectedGraphWebMapPlugin

-- MagnusLewisSmith - 04 Jul 2005

Will definitely test this plugin as soon as possible. Great idea!

-- FranzJosefSilli - 11 Jul 2005

This Plugin looks very promising! Magnus, thanks for sharing

How about measuring and documenting the PluginBenchmarks?

-- PeterThoeny - 12 Jul 2005

checked .zip into CVS

-- WillNorris - 19 Jul 2005

I think having the possibility to constrain the size of the image would be nice...

-- IgorCastang - 09 Nov 2005

This answered a wish I had for my twiki. I like it a lot. If you plan on adding to it please consider this.

• Max map and image size
• detecting changes in the web and throwing away old maps

Updated plugin with a size parameter and a little example webmap. Uploaded a new version from SVN.

-- SteffenPoulsen - 16 Apr 2006

Hi, interesting! Will definitely try this out. Two things:

• the example webmap is clickable, but most links don't work in my case. They point to http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Plugins/%SCRIPTURLPATH%/
  • Yep, unfortunately forgot that Cairo doesn't support the SCRIPTURLPATH variable. Should be re-written at next release. -- SteffenPoulsen - 17 Apr 2006
    • Updated with latest release. -- SteffenPoulsen - 19 Apr 2006
• is there a reason for the lines not being very smooth? See for example the one from TWikiAdminGroup to TWikiGuest. Is this configurable or does it represent underlying limitations? This is very much a minor issue, though.
  • I believe there are some approaches to this, both smooth-scaling the image and smoothing the lines. Feel free to figure out something - it's not really a priority of mine :-/ -- SteffenPoulsen - 17 Apr 2006

-- JosMaccabiani - 17 Apr 2006

Hmmm. Although i've enabled (and re-enabled) the plugin in Configure, in InstalledPlugins I still have:

TWiki::Plugins::DirectedGraphWebMapPlugin::initPlugin did not return true (0)

Any idea what might be going wrong? All files have the same permissions as the other ~10 plugins that work OK. (TWiki 4.0.2)

-- JosMaccabiani - 18 Apr 2006

DirectedGraphWebMapPlugin depends directly on DirectedGraphPlugin, so that needs to be enabled as well. I'd guess that's why it's not initializing properly.

-- SteffenPoulsen - 18 Apr 2006

Oops, I see the dependency now. I added it to the installation instructions as well, if you don't mind.

• Thanks! Updated with latest release. -- SteffenPoulsen - 19 Apr 2006

-- JosMaccabiani - 18 Apr 2006

I tried to install this plugin and its dependencies.

And I got it to run and produce maps. But the maps are have very small bubbles with text so small that you can read nothing.

I tried the WebMap in the TWiki web and the server timed out. Then I tried a web with fewer topics and it showed the map where you cannot read anything. So not much success here. The test was done on a latest Centos.

I could get the DirectedGraphPlugin to work fine. The demo example renders in an OK size with readable characters.

-- KennethLavrsen - 18 Apr 2006

The TWiki web is an interesting case

• TWiki WebMap at a distance:
  

• 2500 edges
• ~10 min render time (2.4ghz P4) - this is why you have problems doing the rendering from inside TWiki (on top the dot process needs to run twice, one time for the png and one time for the map file).
• needs at least ~25 megapixel to not be nitty-gritty imho.
• I think a map of that would need a very large (~150+ inch) viewport to make sense. I.e. a standard monitor is a challenge, large size print/plot/poster probably better (with size="160,120" texts begins to be readable). Btw: If you get "small bubbles" in your tests, try to blow up your image size - i.e. add something like size="20,15" to your webmap parameters).

• TWiki WebMap detail view:
  

For the sake of satisfying initial curiousity I have uploaded a version of the TWiki WebMap rendered in SVG.

• TWikiWebMap.svg: TWiki WebMap rendered in SVG format
• TWikiWebMap.txt: TWiki WebMap source for dot

SVG support is built into firefox these days, so you can view the image directly if you're in a newer version of that browser - though I'm afraid you will probably find it too slow to support this case You can use something like http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/batik/svgviewer.html#downloading for displaying the file instead - not that is blazingly fast in handling this svg file, but it is faster.

SVG has clickable map support builtin, so it'll be a great format for displaying these kind of graphs once zoom/pan etc gets somewhat easier for users to use.

-- SteffenPoulsen - 18 Apr 2006

Please consider adding use strict; to this plugin. Its use is important to ensuring the quality of TWiki plugins and avoiding unpleasant surprises. See UseStrict for more.

-- MeredithLesly - 02 Jul 2006

I've installed this on v4 and can get some output, but with problems. 'excludesystem="1"' seems to be excluding everything because I get no image when it's set. Also, the rendered topic doesn't have the image map anywhere in it.

-- BillGunter - 17 Jul 2006

Okay, I removed WebHome from @systemTopics in DirectedGraphWebMapPlugin.pm and now the map is being included, even for topics where excludesystem="1" isn't set.

-- BillGunter - 17 Jul 2006

We are trying it on v4 but we see some strange behaviour: let's suppose you want to draw the map of the url1/topic1 topic inside a topic url2/topic2. Suppose also that topic1 has 2 "sons": url1/topic11 and url1/topic12. The map is correctly drawn but the links inside the "bubbles" are "mixed-up": the "bubble" of "Topic11" links to url2/topic11 instead of url1/topic11 and the one of "Topic12" to url2/topic12 instead of url1/topic12

-- FabrizioBerdondini - 25 Aug 2006

Great plugin. Very useful. I have a couple of suggestions though:

• adding TWikiPreferences in the list of system topics?
• show the current topic in different style in a topicmap,e.g. different colour, or font, or similar.

I also second CullenNewsom's suggestion that it should throw out old maps automatically. Thanks!

-- StephanMatthiesen - 14 Jan 2007

I noticed a problem: It seems that the %TOPICMAP% doesn't like the TagMePlugin. The topicmap doesn't show links that appear after a %TAGME% variable....

-- StephanMatthiesen - 20 Sep 2007

The issue that old maps are not thrown away is no longer a problem. There have been changes in DirectedGraphPlugin; this now uses a different naming scheme, so when a graph is updated, the same filename is used.

-- StephanMatthiesen - 22 Jan 2008