Phil, Thanks for the feedback. I agree that time spent iterating on the Provenance UI would not be wasteful. Pulling in elements from the main canvas seems like a reasonable place to start.
However, that graph is all about the data lineage, not the data flow. The necessary events to tell the entire story often times comes from the same processor. What I mean here, is that processors are able to emit as many provenance events as necessary to describe what it actually did to the data. Additionally, some events do not originate from processors. Some actions like REPLAYing or DOWNLOADing come from actions users have with the Provenance UI. Simply showing the components from the main canvas may lose important granularity. Another important note here is that the lineage is a view of time. This means that the graph starts with the oldest events and continues throughout the lineage of that data in a linear fashion. This makes it really easy to comprehend what happened to the data and in what order. Showing this timeline using the data flow graph can quickly become confusing when the route the data took starts looping, forking, joining, etc. If I've not understood your suggestion completely, please let me know. Also looking forward to other thoughts... Thanks! Matt On Thu, Jan 15, 2015 at 11:54 PM, Philip Young <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > > I know that the provenance graph view has gone through a couple of > different iterations but I always get the feeling when using it that it is > like the poor cousin compared to the main interface. > > What I would like to see, as mentioned in another discussion, is some > awesome sauce applied to this area. It would be more useful to view the > exact path that a flowfile has travelled on the main interface. The concept > of the timeline from the existing provenance view could be integrated into > the main interface when in provenance view mode. When the timeline is > advanced, the processor and connectors that the flowfile is currently in > could be highlighted (additional data about the type of provenance event > could also be augmented in the view). If there is cloning, then cloned > flowfile could also be shown in the animation. > > I believe that this approach of reusing the main interface for provenance > makes more sense, as users are already familiar with their graph and it > would be more intuitive to view provenance on the graph that the flowfile > actually travelled. > > Hope that makes sense. Would be interested in others thoughts on this. > > Cheers > Phil Young > >
