issues with Visone quick layout

[Melanie Nagel]

Hi,

I am currently teaching a workshop and we are also using visone. A few of my students had problems when they clicked on the quick layout button. The program then stopped working and kept reloading. The only way to prevent this was to close visone. It happened only to a few students, not to all.
This is a new problem, I have worked with visone for many years and never had it before.
What could be a solution?

Thanks!

Melanie

[Müller Julian]

Hi Melanie,

I haven’t run into this issue myself, even though I have been using (the cutting-edge development version of) visone and its quick layout quite extensively in the last month, so I don’t know yet what the cause or solution is.

The quick layout algorithm itself has been basically unchanged for years (but will have some minor tweaks in the next version).

However, I did make some changes in visone 2.27 to the way the quick layout algorithm’s execution is started up as I did some work to separate UI and network algorithms more cleanly and unify the algorithm handling. As a side effect, the algorithm should run on the UI thread in visone 2.27, while it ran on some other worker thread in prior versions. (However, the old approach was inherently fragile because visone would not really make sure that the UI thread does not access the network data structure while the worker thread is modifying it).

I have a few questions to understand and narrow down the problem: What do you mean by “kept reloading”? Does the wait cursor keep spinning? Does the UI just stay unresponsive? Or is the network just not drawn, but other parts of the UI remain responsive? Does this problem only happen on a specific operating system? Does it also happen with visone 2.26? Did some error message appear in the console/terminal (if visone was started using bash or cmd)?

Best,
Julian

[Melanie Nagel]

Hi Julian,

Many thanks for your reply. I was also a bit surprised as this happened. We used the DNA sample data of Philip Leifelds webpage and exported a network and imported this into Visone via graphml. The students had visone installed and they opened the data. Then I explained the quick layout function and they clicked on it. For about 5 students (out of 15), this was not possible. The program loaded and loaded and YES, the wait cursor keep spinning. The network did not change and kept the same. It happened to Windows systems. (besides this one other student with a Mac had the usual problems to install the program, this might be a problem with Java)

We did not try it with visone 2.26. 

I will ask them to see if there is an error message in the console/terminal if visone was started using bash or cmd. 

Now, I send them an email with the last two suggestions and then we will see and I will keep you posted.

Thanks again and best Melanie

[Müller Julian]

Hi Melanie,

Could you send me (julian....@gess.ethz.ch) a graphml file that triggered this problem for one of the affected students? Maybe there is something problematic to these concrete graphml files.

Best,
Julian