Color by...

[Wookey]

On 2025-02-14 18:27 -0500, Richard Knapp wrote:
> Is there a way to group section of a large project so the colors be consistent: Main cave as one color, first branch another, etc….?

Not a good way no.

The only way I can think of to do it currently is to put fake dates on
surveys (matching dates for areas you want coloured the same) and
'colour by date'. Which isn't really something one wants to do, as
real dates matter.

Or if you re-arranged the survey structure so that things you wanted
the same colour were the same survey. and then 'colour by
srurvey'. But that doesn't sound at all satisfactory either.

If the 'colour by survey' mode could perhaps be adjusted to show
higher level survey groupings then the current 'every survey is a
different colour no matter how small', that might be a sufficieint
mechanism for many cases, but possibly what's wanted is an entirely
independent grouping, which is just used for display purposes.

There are plenty of occasions where this sort of thing would be
useful, but it's not obvious what the best way to do it would be.

One could have *group (or whatever name) to define a display style (we
already used 'style' for the survey method). So that would go in the
data, and if it propogated withthe survey structure by default, and
begin/ends, you might not have to change too many places.

Or one could write a separate 'mapping' a bit like the espec files
that say what surveys to put in what styles, and also what those
styles look like. The you load a survey and a style to get that
'view'. This allows more than one view for a given dataset.

Or it could be a point-and-click sort of thing in aven (but then you
need a way to record it or you'll be doing it over and over again,
which would get boring fast).

Would any of these work for people?

Knowing what sorts of things people want to achieve, for what purposes
would help design something that might stand the test of time.

For our group being able to 'colour by cave' would be very
helpful/useful. And that fairly directly matches the survey structure,
but not at the top level (kataster area), not the bottom level
(individual surveys). So some mechanism to say what 'level' of the
survey grouping the colouring should traverse might be sufficient. The
issue is that people have all sorts of different structures, and
'cave' might be one level down in one part of the dataset, but two
levels doewn in another. It's not an easy thing to generalise, but
some experiments at least might not need much code.

Wookey
-- 
Principal hats:  Debian, Wookware
http://wookware.org/
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