I am looking of inspiration for doing interaction design on a hierachy/tree structure. (products with a number of subproducts, rules that apply for selecting subproducts).
I want to have a tree where there is a visible connection between sub-nodes and their parent node. And i also want to visualize which rules that apply for selecting them.
Typical rules:
mandatory: select only one of one sub-product
optional: select 0 or more of several subproducts
mutual exclusive: select only one of several subproducts
I hope you get the idea.
I am looking for any inspiration in this area. Any suggestions, examples, tips are welcome
Here are several:
http://thejit.org/
http://www.jsviz.org/blog/
http://vis.stanford.edu/protovis/
If you are willing to use something other than html/javascript, Flare is an excellent library for Adobe Flash.
I've used Infoviz library for such scenario (here's the demo). You could use distinct node colors for different selection rules together with some textual description, although it wouldn't be very intuitive at first.
Default tree orientation is horizontal, which may look odd, but makes sense when you add textual node names of variable length.
Related
I am in the process of creating a graph database, a simple one for movies with several types of information like the actors, producers, directors and so on.
What I would like to know is, is it better to break down your nodes to a more granular level? For example, is it better to have two kinds of nodes for 'actors' and 'directors' or is it better to have one node, say 'person' and use different kinds of relationships like 'acted_in' and 'directed'? Does this even matter at all?
Further, is there any impact on the traversal queries? Does having more types of nodes mean that the traversal is slower?
Note: I intend to implement this using the Gremlin console in Amazon Neptune.
The answer really is it depends. If I were building such a model I would break out the key "nouns" into their own nodes. I would also label the edges appropriately such as ACTED_IN or DIRECTED.
The performance of any graph query depends on how much data it will need to touch (the fan out factor as you go from depth to depth).
The best advice I can give you is think about the questions you will need the graph to answer and try to design your data model so that writing those queries is as easy as possible. Don't be afraid to iterate multiple times on your data model also. That is common and expected.
Properties can be useful when you want to add a unique piece of information to a node - perhaps the birthday of the director.
Edge properties can be useful for filtering out unneeded edges but edge labels can also. In some cases you may find a label such as DIRECTED-IN-2005 is a useful short cut to avoid checking a label and a property on an edge.
I'm trying to model a business rule set in EA.
The rules are easily described in a decision table: a column is a matching condition, a row is a rule, if all the conditions are matched in a row then the rule matched. More info is available in the Drools docs, for example.
These rules are an integral part of the application, even if on a different level than the technology details (classes, database tables, etc.). So naturally I would like to add the decision table to my documentation in EA.
I found no way to do this. EA doesn't even know about a "table" or a "spreadsheet", let alone decision tables. I would be happy to simply insert my XLS as an "attachment" to the model, but I didn't find a way to do that either.
Any ideas are appreciated.
There currently seems to be no way to do this short of taking a screen shot of the decision table and pasting it into the generated report after the fact. I believe it is in Sparx System's road-map to implement but no immediate time-frame has been given.
You could try submitting a feature request via their official forms, it can do nothing but add more ammunition to the request. At the very least they should notify you when its available.
Update1: You could always paste that screen shot into the linked document (Ctrl+Alt+D) of the parent element that contains the business rules matrix. This could then be automatically included in the auto generated report. At least then it is still contained in the model and can be used in many places.
Update2: Just Rereading your OP, are you actually using EA's business Rules engine? or are you just after a matrix that can be included in the reporting? if it is the latter then you have two options.
The first is the Relationship Matrix (View -> Relationship matrix). This can be included automatically in RTF and HTML generated reports as well has the option to Export to CSV, save as a png or metafile.
The second option is to shoehorn the State Machine Table, (From a State Machine Diagram, right click and select State Chart Editor - Table) Both of these options will allow you to layout a grid style table where you can compare your business rules.
I hope this helps
I have a content type that references multiple nodes, and I need a way to sort the display of those referenced nodes.
Any ideas?
--- EDIT ---
Clarification:
I'm not using views, but rather am using my own queries.
I have a bunch of teachers (teacher content-type), and some conferences (conference content-type).
Within the conference content-type I want a node-reference field set to handle multiple teacher selections. But I need to be able to manually order them independently. What that means is that each individual conference needs to be able to sort the order of the particular teachers selected.
That's the ideal situation, but not the way I'm actually doing it.
What I'm ACTUALLY doing to jury-rig this thing is to have separate node-reference fields (teacher 1, teacher 2, teacher 3 etc.). Each node-reference field independent of the others.
It makes for a mess when it comes to creating views or composing db queries.
I know what I'm looking for is all but impossible, but I thought I'd run it by the Drupal gurus here anyway...
--- EDIT 2 ---
Further clarification:
Another way to do what I want, but is really impractical, is to create a separate nodequeue for each conference. Then you could select a handful of teachers associated with each conference and order them via the nodequeue. - That should help with visualizing the problem. But as a solution, it's even more messy (in terms of administration) than the one I'm currently using.
Also: I should mention that we're talking about 40 to 80 conferences, and 100-200 teachers. Just to get an idea of why I'm looking for a more elegant solution than the two I mentioned above.
Node reference with autocomplete widget gives you reordering capabilities when number of values set to 'unlimited'. Maybe not the most comfortable, but works.
I'm assuming you're using Views since you mentioned "displays". You can always change the order of the view fields from the Views UI but the order will be static (all items will have the same order).
If you want each item to have a potentially different order for the fields maybe you can set up a parent child relationship where the child item is ordered dynamically.
I'm doing a project for a surveying company in Drupal 6. Ultimately, employees will need to enter measurements into a new content type. Currently they do it in a big Excel spreadsheet that has a bunch of macros to do calculations between cells (Meters to Feet, m^2, some pricing stuff).
My question is:
How would one go about replicating the functionality of this spreadsheet best in Drupal 6, keeping in mind the amount of data the employees using this system gather varies between projects (I.e., 3-floor house versus 1-floor with basement; etc.).
I have two ideas so far:
Create a new content type and populate it with CCK fields. Use Sheetnode's CCK functionality to drop Sheetnode CCK fields to replicate the spreadsheet exactly. Use Views to display this data other ways.
Create a new content type and populate it with CCK fields. Use Views (and possibly something like Views Calc) to get varying measurement values.
That said, I'm completely open to suggestions outside of these two implementations.
Thank you!
I dont have an answer so much as a caution. I did a project where a number of pieces of content were rendered simultaneously on a page, each piece being in its own node. The down side to multiple nodes is the performance hit you will take having at least one (possibly complex) query per node.
So in this case, if there were many many lines in the sheet, and each line was a node, you might take a pretty heavy performance knock.
This might be acceptable - but I thought I'd give you the heads up.
This might be one of those times where its best to actually create a purpose-built mechanism on-top of the Drupal API instead of using nodes+CCK.
Like I said, I could be being over cautious. It depends on your exact usecase.
HTH!
This seems like the kind of question http://drupal.stackexchange.com was made for...
I ended up doing this with jQuery, Measured Value Field and Flexinode; see: Auto-updating width/length/area using jQuery and Drupal6
I would like to know a few practical use-cases (if they are not related/tied to any programming language it will be better).I can associate Sets, Lists and Maps to practical use cases.
For example if you wanted a glossary of a book where terms that you want are listed alphabetically and a location/page number is the value, you would use the collection TreeMap(OrderedMap which is a Map)
Somehow, I can't associate MultiSets with any "practical" usecase. Does someone know of any uses?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiset does not tell me enough :)
PS: If you guys think this should be community-wiki'ed it is okay. The only reason I did not do it was "There is a clear objective way to answer this question".
Lots of applications. For example, imagine a shopping cart. That can contain more than one instance of an item - i.e. 2 cpu's, 3 graphics boards, etc. So it is a Multi-set. One simple implementation is to also keep track of the number of items of each - i.e. keep around the info 2 cpu's, 3 graphics boards, etc.
I'm sure you can think of lots of other applications.
A multiset is useful in many situations in which you'd otherwise have a Map. Here are three examples.
Suppose you have a class Foo with an accessor getType(), and you want to know, for a collection of Foo instances, how many have each type.
Similarly, a system could perform various actions, and you could use a Multiset to keep track of how many times each action occurred.
Finally, to determine whether two collections contain the same elements, ignoring order but paying attention to how often instances are repeated, simply call
HashMultiset.create(collection1).equals(HashMultiset.create(collection2))
In some fields of Math, a set is treated as a multiset for all purposes. For example, in Linear Algebra, a set of vectors is teated as a multiset when testing for linear dependancy.
Thus, implementations of these fields should benefit from the usage of multisets.
You may say linear algebra isn't practical, but that is a whole different debate...
A Shopping Cart is a MultiSet. You can put several instances of the same item in a Shopping Cart when you want to buy more than one.