As I am not a python person I am a bit ambivalent about starting
this thread because I may not be able to finish it, but here goes.
01. I find GraphView to be a rather remarkable addition to the
very good facilities built into the concepts, architecture and
implementation of Gramps. As currently implemented, to the best
of my knowledge [maybe someone will point out some configuration
capability that I have missed], however, it has a couple of
characteristics which do not suit my needs. I have, therefore,
spent a good deal of time this past week reading the code and the
documentation from the Graphviz suite upon which it depends. From
what I have been able to apprehend, I believe I could modify
GraphView to meet my needs.
02. With that as a starting point, the reason for this posting
is that I suspect that my needs may be similar to needs of many
other Gramps users, so I would like to seek some feedback to see
whether or not I could try to author something that would me
worthwhile for others.
There are a couple of aspects to "my needs," come of which are
likely not to be of general interest, so let me begin where I
believe the greatest amount of interest might be. The quick way
to do that is to refer to this stackoverflow thread:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2271704/family-tree-layout-with-dot-graphviz
Now I realize that the thread is pretty long and that it was not
directly concerned with Gramps, but you will, I believe, find it
very relevant to the GraphView implementation. So, the short
description of this need would be: "The rendering of the segment
of a family tree selected via GraphView ought to have the classic
appearance of a family tree with regular, orthogonal connecting
lines."
03. Beyond that there are, of course, some other details
concerning the content, formatting or ordering of the person nodes
in the tree, and some of those might also be addressed, but I
don't think this is the time to worry about those details. For a
summary statement of why competent folk [with competency both in
the subject matter of genealogy and algorithms for processing
directed, acyclic graphs] who have worked hard on those
objectives, and usually had to accept practical limits concerning
what is achievable, I think you could google for a fortnight and
not find a more generally agreed-upon statement than that which is
found in the thread as being posted by the user called "EL."
The problem is, at least for me, that one does wish to nicely,
compactly include more of the relationships of some selected
person. GraphView's logic does handle a somewhat more complex set
of relationships exceptionally well, and manages to use
graphviz.dot semantics to do a very good job of getting a
rendering with no intersecting edges.
04. So with that background/context, these are my questions:
A. If you are looking for some similar enhanced
capabilities, for your own purposes do you need the output to be
an interactive panel inside a Gramps session [basically
maintaining the current functionality], or would your own needs be
served by delivering a graphview.dot file that you would use in
the rest of your workflow.
B. If your needs would best be met by the delivery of a
graphview.dot file, are you OK, with the present implementation
which uses Gramps' internal handles as unique identifiers, or
would you prefer that the gramps_id be used. [I realize that the
second question gets to a pretty discrete level of technical
detail, but I assume that if your interests/needs fall into the
category of a graphview.dot file, you have acquainted yourself
with the Gramps data model. Indeed, you very likely understand
that data model better than I do. In my own use case, I create a
slightly modified sqllite database built from an export of the
Gramps database, and in my experience the gramps_id field must
always constitute a valid 'natural key' for the table in which it
appears, thus guaranteeing select queries with joins will yield
the same result set as is obtained by performing the corresponding
joins using the 'synthetic keys' called handles.]
05. In summary conclusion, I am pretty well committed to doing
some python work to get what will be a more useful result for
myself. If you find enough overlapping interest, or if you ever
would like to take on the python coding, I would like to hear your
thoughts.
Thank you.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most
engaging tech sites, SlashDot.org!
http://sdm.link/slashdot_______________________________________________
Gramps-users mailing list
[hidden email]
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/gramps-usershttps://gramps-project.org
Locked
