color by level Re: Color by...

[Warren Family]

I don't really follow what 'color by survey' is doing -- I didn't find 
it described in the documentation but maybe I'm looking in the wrong 
place.  I did some experiments on the Dow Prov survey data and I'm 
getting confusing results (link to .3d file below if you want to try).

Loading the full .3d file and displaying it in aven, colored by survey, 
seems to end up with the whole of Providence Pot (one level down) the 
same color although it contains several sublevels, but other parts such 
as the various sublevels of Dow Cave which are two levels down get 
colored differently.  Then for the latter, whereas most of the sublevels 
under choke2 in Dow (two levels down) are colored differently, the 
levels labelled 'albert1', 'albert2' and 'albert3' appear to have the 
same color.  I don't think this is by chance as it appears to be the 
same if I just load the .3d file for Dow Cave, thus removing the top 
level.  On the other hand if I just load the Providence Pot .3d file 
then the different sublevels do get colored differently

https://github.com/patrickbwarren/qgis3-survex-import/blob/master/DowProv/DowProv.3d

Am I right that it's only the *begin and *end hierarchy that can be 
inferred from the .3d file, not the *include's and definitely not the 
directory structure ...  (I'm not proposing to change this BTW!).  So 
'survey structure' means the *begin..*end hierarchy as displayed on the 
left-hand side of the GUI in aven, and 'level' refers to the level 
within that.

At the moment in aven there is an option to hide or show levels by 
right-clicking on the labels shown in the cave structure on the 
left-hand side in the GUI.  Perhaps it could be relatively easy to allow 
the user to right-click on a label and color that + all sublevels to the 
_same_ color.  This could be a random color or perhaps a short list of 
options (eg white, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, grey, random).

If you wanted to highlight a particular part of a cave, you could then 
right-click on the corresponding label in the data structure and set the 
color of that subsection.

Patrick


On 15/02/2025 00:12, Wookey wrote:
> 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
> 
>