highlighting selected stations Re: Color by...

[Olly Betts]

On Sat, Feb 15, 2025 at 03:07:00PM +0000, Warren Family wrote:
> In earlier versions of aven, hovering over a name in the survey structure on
> the RHS of the GUI would cause all the corresponding stations to light up,
> as it were.

It wasn't on mouse-over before - to highlight the stations in a survey
you used to have to double-click.

> This got changed at some point so now instead a loop is thrown
> around the selected stations.  I can see why this change is useful in many
> circumstances, but it actually broke some important use-cases for me.  The
> basic problem with using a loop is that if you zoom in, you completely lose
> the critical information on which survey stations have been highlighted.
> This is a critical issue if you want to see in detail where a particular
> part of a cave system lies in relation to another part, or (in my case, in
> the Easegill data set) figuring out exactly where the different parts join
> up.

I wanted to reduce the number of clicking actions on surveys (we briefly
got to the point where you needed to quadruple click on a survey for
something) so wanted a way to highlight which could happen on
mouse-over.  This also matches better how we highlight a station if you
mouse-over it in the tree.

The old highlighting was implemented by triggering a search for
survey_name + ".*", which seemed unhelpful to do on mouse-over as it
clears any active search.  I came up with drawing a loop as it can be
done fast enough to happen on mouse-over and visually looks somewhat
like the ring drawn to highlight a station.  It's actually an octagon
with rounded corners based on the N, NE, E, SE, etc extremes so we
just need to scan the stations in the survey to find those extremes
and then draw a line-loop based on them.

> Another use-case is that it is sometimes very illuminating to easily see the
> stations in a given cave passage.  For example in the Easegill data set,
> Wretched Rabbit very clearly lights up as a single inlet series, into the
> main drain, in the middle of the complex network of passages at that end of
> the system.  It's virtually impossible to see this any other way.

FWIW, you can still type the survey name plus ".*" into the search
manually.

> What would be great would be to have both options available: highlighting
> the selected stations, or throwing a loop around the selected stations.
> Presumably this wouldn't take much to implement since it must just amount to
> restoring the original highlighting code, and adding a suitable pair menu
> options.  At one point I did try to do this myself but I lacked sufficient
> familiarity with the aven code to be able to easily figure it out.

We can't really restore the old way, even as an option, as double-click
on a survey now changes the view to show that survey.  It'd be really
confusing if double-click did something else when you enabled this
options.

We could add a "Search for this survey" option to the menu you get from
right-clicking on a survey though.

The other option would be to come up with a way to highlight all the
stations (or perhaps better all the legs) in a survey more precisely
that the currently somewhat crude loop, but which is fast enough to do
on mouse-over.

Probably best to open a ticket in trac so this doesn't get forgotten.

Cheers,
    Olly