Replies: 4 comments
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To add to this, it would be beneficial if there were a way to use the workflows to customize how the visualizer will display certain jobs or collections of jobs. Now that Reusable Workflows can be up to 4 layers deep, jobs that reside within those workflows can cause the visualizer to expand greatly, especially if building a continuous workflow that deploys to multiple environments in a dependency chain. It would be great if you could signify in the reusable workflow that the visualizer should group all or some jobs together as matrix jobs are group or something similar. |
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I raised this issue separately with GitHub before I knew of this discussion. In our case the particular issue was that new users were not finding our artifacts, since they are hidden below the graph and scrolling the page - or indeed learning that it is even scrollable - is extremely difficult for the uninitiated as magicus describes.
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Personally, I have resorted to using an adblocker and am blocking the element containing the visualization graph. But as you say, it does not help newcomers. :-( |
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how do i disable this? it freezes some of our larger projects and is unecessary i have added the filter mentioned above by magicus as a work around |
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TL;DR: The job dependency visualization graph box provides no value, but actively hinders you from getting to the relevant data. It's counterproductive and should be removed, hidden by default or, as a last resort, moved to the absolute bottom of the page).
Long story:
The visualization graph box, on the "Summary" page of a workflow run, is problematic from a UI/UX perspective. See for instance this run: https://github.com/magicus/jdk/actions/runs/2442545082. The gray
main.yml
box occupies most of my laptop screen. I need to scroll past it to be able to see the Annotations, Artifacts and markdown summary sections. These sections are far more important to me, yet they are unavailable to me by default.To make matters worse, scrolling is almost impossible on a device with a touch pad. If your cursor is over the job list to the left, it only scrolls the job list, which does not make the visualization graph scroll off the screen. And if your cursor is over the graph itself, the scrolling is interpreted as a zoom, and scrolling is blocked. So to actually be able to scroll past the graph, you must position your mouse cursor carefully on the thin border outside of the graph.
All of this is annoying, but what makes matter even worse is that the visualization graph is of very little use. Let's go back to my example at https://github.com/magicus/jdk/actions/runs/2442545082. This is a highly complex workflow scenario. But this means that the graph starts out in a zoomed-out mode, where any text is practically unreadable. If you really want to use the graph, you need to zoom in, and pan around. But even if you do this, you will soon discover that the graph lies to you. What seems like edges connecting nodes are, in fact, not always such. A job node can be placed "on top" of an edge, so the edge "passes through", below the node. (A more reasonable expectation is that the graph layout algorithm would have routed the edge around the node.) So to truly understand the relationships, you need to click on each node in term, because only then do the proper edges get highlighted in blue. For a great example of this, see: https://github.com/magicus/jdk/actions/runs/360576283.
But, you might say, these examples are very complicated runs, and the graph was not designed to handle them. Well, what then, was it designed for? My second half of this criticism is that for simpler run, the graph is utterly pointless. If you have only a single job, the graph fills no purpose at all. The only real situation I can see is if you have e.g. two separate jobs, like
build
andtest
, where the latter depends on the former. But then again, is there really a need to visualize this? For an example of a trivial job, see: https://github.com/Wynntils/Artemis/actions/runs/2453440666. Even here, though it adds absolutely no value, the graph box steals 1/4 of my screen space, and I need to scroll to get to the bottom of the Gradle summary.I hope you will seriously consider doing something about this. My primary suggestion is to get rid of the graph box, since it does not meet user expectations. If you are unable or unwilling to do that, at the very least try to hide it. Make it "collapsed" by default, and/or move it to the bottom of the summary page, below the annotations, artifacts and markdown summary. (And while you're at it, I think the markdown summary is more useful to have higher up on the page than the artifacts. Typically you'll check the summary before deciding if you need to download artifacts.)
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