Color by...

[Footleg]

Perhaps the addition of a 'tag' option in surveys, and a colour by tag
feature in Aven would be very flexible and not too much work to implement?
The downside being the need to edit the survey data to add tags according
to the visualisation you want.
Maybe just being able to select nodes in the survey tree in Aven and assign
a colour to the view on the fly would be better?

Just a couple of ideas off the top of my head.

Footleg

On Sat, Feb 15, 2025 at 12:12 AM Wookey <wookey at wookware.org> 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
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