Relation between actions and renderers

It is unclear what the relation between actions and renderers.

According to Heer's explanations, actions are supposed to assign visual values to a group of VisualItems, such as colors, shapes, positions, sizes, and etc. BUT the final appearance of an item should be rendered by renderers some of which will decide sizes, and shapes.

This relation could work fine if the position or size of an VisualItem have been pre-set. However, some problem will occur, e.g. the size of an item is change according to the rendering area, or the position of an item were decided by other items. In these cases, an action should tell its renderer an absolute value of size. The duty of renderers shift to actions.

Find a VisualItem directly

In order to find a VisualItem in prefuse Visualization, there are two ways.

#1 The general way is to get an Iterator by calling Visualization class' item(), getGroup(), or other methods, which will return an Iterator. Then in a while loop, query this Iterator one by one and search for the VisualItem with certain contents.

Iterator i= v.items(SOURCE);

VisualItem vitem, v1=null, v2=null;

while(i.hasNext()){

vitem=(VisualItem) i.next();

if (vitem instanceof VisualItem){

if (vitem.getInt("ID")==s){

v1=vitem;

}

if (vitem.getInt("ID")==t){

v2=vitem;

}

}

}

#2 A specific way is to cast the TupleSet into a VisualTable if your back up data is a Table. So in this way, the VisualItem can be directly queried by using the row number.

VisualTable ts=(VisualTable) v.getGroup(SOURCE);

VisualItem v1=ts.getItem(s-1);

VisualItem v2=ts.getItem(t-1);

The speed of #2 is much fast than #1. Using this solution, it is easy to handle ~10000 nodes and lines.

But #1 is safe, since if your backup data is not a Table, there may be an exception of casting TupleSet into VisualTable.

If your data nodes is small, ~1000, #1 solution would be safe to use. If you want speed, use #2 with careful data design.

Design your own actions and renderers

Prefuse offers a set of actions and renderers to create nice and neat visualization applications.

Based on three weeks digging into the source codes of prefuse and trail-and-fail in a tabluer data demo, my understanding of part of the Actions and Renderers are related blow:

The basic logic is to use actions to assign visual features, such as colors, shapes, sizes, and position. And use renderers to finally paint these visual units with above features.

In terms of colorAction, dataColorAction, the key component is the "process" method, which assign the visual features to a VisualItem.

In shapeRenderer class, the key component is the "getShape" method and "render" method. Particularly, the "render" method that initialize the final painting of a VisualItem. In general "render" method will call PrefuseLib's "paint" method to do the painting.

Therefore, if the prefuse's default actions cannot help your customized application, it is necessary to write customized actions and renders. Here are one example for my work.

Design idea: draw a visualitem with a sequence of color-coded rectangles whose width is also customized. See the image.

In prefuse's default setting, one visualitem only has one color and one shape assigned with it (seen in the previous post). To my best knowledge, default color and shape actions cannot fulfill my design idea because my design require one visualitem to have multiple colors and shapes.

In order to achieve my design idea, I have to add a column into the data table, named length, which will store an integer array for lengths of these rectangles. Also to give the rectangles different colors, I need to add another column, named colors, which is used to store an integer array assigned to each rectangle.

The default colorAction and shapeAction process each VisualItem with its colors and shape. Therefore I need to write my own coloraction and renderer to deal with the arrays.

For my own coloraction, I create a class, named CompositedColorAction, which extends EncoderAction. And override its

public void process(VisualItem vi, double frac)

method. Here are the method codes:

@Override

public void process(VisualItem vi, double d) {

List l=getTypeList(vi);

ArrayList colors=new ArrayList();

for (int i=0;i

if (l.get(i) instanceof Integer){

colors.add(m_palette[(Integer) l.get(i)]);

}else throw new IllegalArgumentException(

"Unrecognized data type");

}

vi.set(m_colorListField, colors);

}

In these codes add an array of colors to the column "color" in a visual item for render to use.

To render multiple rectangles, I write a CompositedShapeRenderer class, which extends ShapeRender, and override its

public void Render(Graphics2D g, VisualItem vi)

method.

Here are the source codes.

@Override

public void render(Graphics2D g, VisualItem vi){

Shape[] shapes=getRawShapes(vi);

int[] colors=getRawColors(vi);

if (shapes!=null){

GraphicsLibPlus.compositedPaint(g, vi, shapes, colors, vi.getStroke(), getRenderType(vi));

}

}

Here the getRawShapes() and getRawColors() method is as below:

protected Shape[] getRawShapes(VisualItem vi) {

// a temp shape array to store all rectganles

Shape[] tempShapes=null;

// create shapes

double x=vi.getX();

double y=vi.getY();

if ( Double.isNaN(x) || Double.isInfinite(x) )

x = 0;

if ( Double.isNaN(y) || Double.isInfinite(y) )

y = 0;

ArrayList sizes=(ArrayList) vi.get(m_type);

tempShapes=new Shape[sizes.size()];

for (int i=0;i

m_shape=new RoundRectangle2D.Double();

m_shape.setRoundRect(x, y, (Integer)sizes.get(i)*m_baseSize,

m_baseSize, m_arcWidth, m_arcHeight);

tempShapes[i]=m_shape;

x=x+(Integer)sizes.get(i)*m_baseSize;

}

return tempShapes;

}

protected int[] getRawColors(VisualItem vi){

int[] tempColors=null;

ArrayList colors=(ArrayList) vi.get(m_colors);

tempColors=new int[colors.size()];

for (int i=0;i

tempColors[i]=(Integer) colors.get(i);

}

return tempColors;

} //end of getRawColors method

The two methods read the colors and widths from the visual item's "types" and "colors" columns and ask the paint method to render the rectangles with different colors.

Here the render method use a new painting method, called

GraphicsLibPlus.compositedpait.nnt()

I rewrite this method from prefuse' original painting method, called GraphicsLib.paint(). Because the original method only paint one shape, I have create a new painting method.

Summary:

In order to design your own visualization, you need to do a lot on actions and renderers. Usually you specify some new columns in a data tuple (a data row), and use actions to change values of these columns, and ask renderers to paint this visual item by looking at these rows and paint accordingly. If the original GraphicsLib.paint() method does not work, you need to write a new class and new paint() method for your purposes.

Welcome to add comments and ask questions from my site (see upper left conner of this page).

The structure of a VisulItem

VisulItem is the basic unit for prefuse' renderers to deal with. Also it extends a row in a data table, adding many columns into the row with many features associated with visual representation.

For a simple data table like this: Test Table

protected final Schema tableschema=new Schema();

{

tableschema.addColumn(ID, int.class);

tableschema.addColumn(SIMscore, float.class);

tableschema.addColumn(LINES, float.class);

}

The table schema is same as above.

Schema[(ID, int, -1) (score, float, 0.0) (lines, float, 0.0)]

When this table is associated with a Visualization, a VisualTable is created and the schema of this table is:

Schema[(_validated, boolean, false) (_visible, boolean, true) (_visible:start, boolean, false) (_visible:end, boolean, true) (_interactive, boolean, true) (_expanded, boolean, true) (_fixed, boolean, false) (_highlight, boolean, false) (_hover, boolean, false) (_x, double, 0.0) (_x:start, double, 0.0) (_x:end, double, 0.0) (_y, double, 0.0) (_y:start, double, 0.0) (_y:end, double, 0.0) (_bounds, java.awt.geom.Rectangle2D, java.awt.geom.Rectangle2D$Double[x=0.0,y=0.0,w=0.0,h=0.0]) (_strokeColor, int, 0) (_strokeColor:start, int, 0) (_strokeColor:end, int, 0) (_fillColor, int, 0) (_fillColor:start, int, 0) (_fillColor:end, int, 0) (_textColor, int, 0) (_textColor:start, int, 0) (_textColor:end, int, 0) (_size, double, 1.0) (_size:start, double, 1.0) (_size:end, double, 1.0) (_shape, int, 0) (_stroke, java.awt.Stroke, java.awt.BasicStroke@d1a0003e) (_font, java.awt.Font, java.awt.Font[family=SansSerif,name=SansSerif,style=plain,size=10]) (_font:start, java.awt.Font, java.awt.Font[family=SansSerif,name=SansSerif,style=plain,size=10]) (_font:end, java.awt.Font, java.awt.Font[family=SansSerif,name=SansSerif,style=plain,size=10]) (_doi, double, 4.9E-324) (ID, int, -1) (score, float, 0.0) (lines, float, 0.0)]

See the image for clarity.

So now the structure of a VisualItem is clear. Besides the basic three data columns, a set of features are added in, which helps to set up the size, position, color, shape, bound, and etc. And these features can be changed when various EncodingActions are called. For example, ColorAction assigns the color of this item, which is the ROW!!!!!!! (remember? each visualitem represents a row in the table. So one row, one item, and one visual unit in a Visualization). ShapeAction assigns the shape of an item.

Each visual item has its position information, normally assigned by Layout actions, such as AxisLayout, and CircleLayout.

Eventually various Renderers will paint a visual item based on its features that stored in its corresponding columns.

TMHK, Renderers will use PrefuseLib.paint(graphic g, visualitem item) method to do the painting.

In next post, I tried to explain how the Actions and Renderers work, as these two classes need to collaborate to paint a visual item in the right place, with right color and shape.

Learning prefuse, a hard start, but progress made

As many commented, it is a hard start to learn prefuse toolkit. But once dig into the source codes and demos, a good progress has been made.

Have to say Jeff is definitely a genius. Just learn the codes may cause me one year or more, but he finish writing such codes as his master thesis work.

After trial-and-fail for three weeks, now the structure is clear. Will keep posting to help others.