"Show Flow" UI option

Goals

• Provide the ability to more easily visualize related components on a graph
• Potentially improve graph responsiveness by only rendering elements the user is interested in seeing

Background and strategic fit

The NiFi graph is an excellent visualization of how data is flowing through the system.  However, as the data flow becomes more complex, tracing a specific path through the flow becomes more difficult.  We do have the ability to show upstream and downstream connections, however that still leaves tracking an individual path as a manual process.  Using the already available upstream / downstream connection information, it may be possible to improve the visualization of a specific "flow".  This could take the form of highlighting components related to a selected component, or possibly even hiding unrelated components.  Obviously this would need to be made clear in the UI, but doing so could limit the visualization of the graph to only elements a user was interested in at the time.  This could possibly also improve performance of the graph, by avoiding rendering components the user doesn't want to see.  A naive initial implementation proposal would be to use the upstream / downstream connection information to build a list of "flow elements", and then simply render only items on the list when in "show flow" mode...

Assumptions

Requirements

User interaction and design

Questions

Below is a list of questions to be addressed as a result of this requirements document:

Not Doing