View node data

[liamhuber]

It would be really nice to be able to examine the node data (mostly just the channel values) without re-running it.

E.g., here I run the entire workflow then select the middle "Add" node, but there's no way to see its output without hitting "run" again. I know that because of the caching this is (typically) quite fast, but I would still like to be able to investigate the current state of the node.

Since colour-highlighting is nicely triggering off of node (and edge) selection, it would be cool to have a "State" field (or similar) in the accordion box that updates based off of what is selected.

[Tara-Lakshmipathy]

I've been thinking of adding something like that, but wasn't sure how. A button for viewing the state of a node in the normal output screen would mean yet another button on the node panel. A tab in the accordian would mean... well another tab in the accordian. And we still haven't even started integrating executors, semantics and RDM platforms yet.... Grrrrrr... So many features, so little space.

Sometimes I feel like just dumping the entire jupyter ipywidgets stuff and having a fully JS front-end for more flexibility. There would probably still be a way to incroporate into a notebook as a widget anyway. The only drawback is that we would need to make a visualizer that works similar jupyter as well so that we can continue using matplotlib, nglview and stuff.

[Tara-Lakshmipathy]

Reactflow also has a context menu which can be accessed by right-clicking (not yet there in our widget). When we reach a point where we have too many buttons/tabs, we should try to start moving some of them into the context menu.

[liamhuber]

Grrrrrr... So many features, so little space.

Agreed. I think you will probably need to branch out into using different tabs. Right now you have a single graph tab; if I understand, Joerg uses other tabs for other workflows. As an alternative to that (or nesting tabbed documents) you could use other tabs for alternative views of the same graph. So in this case, you might have the main graph tab, and to the right of that a "selected node" tab which gives a deeper dive into that node quite apart from ReactFlow. Such a tab would probably also be a good place for executor information and maybe other stuff. At least as long as you stay in the ipywidget universe, such tabbing shouldn't be too bad.

[Tara-Lakshmipathy]

Either different tabs, or "switch the view" within the same tab. As it stands, we need signals for at least if nodes. I was planning to re-render nodes on the click of a button to swap out data channels and replace them with signals. We could use a similar approach for executors, semantics and upload to RDM platforms. Then different tabs could really be reserved for different workflows to avoid confusion.
We could then have tabs in the accordian for workflow level stuff, e.g., executor for graph submission, semantic composition of workflows (maybe including an LLM prompt) and uploading to RDM.

[Tara-Lakshmipathy]

I added a button to visualize current outputs without running the node. Since the node toolbar was getting crowded, I shifted this button along with the source button to the node context menu (right-click on node). I have not yet merged the pull request. Do you want any further information to be included when the output button is clicked? If not, I will merge it.