Graph Layout Bugs [Description and Discussion]

[chrisdburr]

I thought it would be helpful to setup an issue for the various layout and UI issues related to how the graph is rendered and displayed, so that we can systematically break it down and locate the problems and identify solutions.

Here are three screen recordings that capture the primary issues.

1 Spacing of child elements remains after collapse of parent

As you can see here, when the user collapses a couple of strategy elements and property claim elements, the space that was originally filled by their children remains.

This is a problem because it means the user then has to navigate around unecessary blank space.

unwanted-space.mp4

2 Extra Manual Step

However, building on from 1, we can see that when the user clicks 'refocus' it refreshes the canvas and gives a more desirable state.

Perhaps it would be possible to implement an automatic refocus but with some additional conditional logic that makes it contextual to the state of the graph (e.g. different refocus behaviour if a strategy element is collapsed vs expanded)?

extra-manual-step.mp4

3 Expanding recreates blank space

It may be important to consider the contextual behaviour of the refocus module, because when the user currently expands a node, it seems as though unecessary space is being created.

expand-all-refocus.mp4