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Visualizing Lineage

In LabID you can visualize the relationship between Specimen, Sample, Assay, and Datasets. These relationships are shown in the lineage panel that is visible when looking at items on their detail pages. In addition, for studies, you'll find the Show Lineage button at the top right of the page. Within the lineage visualizer, we can search items, select and group items, collapse them, and so on.

Before going to describe the features one by one. Let's have a look at the top-level menu first.

Top level menu
Figure: Top level global action menu
  1. Legend: This reflects the data displayed in the graph. You can use the eye icon to control the visibility (show/hide) of each type of item.
  2. Fullscreen: This will open a new browser tab with only the lineage panel visible.
  3. Fit graph to canvas: This fits the graph to the viewport of the canvas.
  4. Rearrange: This re-arranges the graph nodes to the initial arrangement. If you hid any items, they will stay hidden.
  5. Layering Direction: You can layer the graph in two directions, (i) Top to Bottom, and (ii) Left to Right (default). You can control this using this action button.
  6. Collapse all Groups: This will collapse all the groups you've on the graph. The collapsed node's color and shape follow these rules-
    • If all the items in the group are the same typed, then the collapsed item will get the same color and shape as the items in the group.
    • If there are different items, then you'll have a red circle as a collapsed item.
  7. Expand all Groups: It's the opposite action of the Collapse all Groups.
  8. Labels Control: As you zoom out, labels are hidden to not clutter the view. You can toggle this behavior to show the labels at every zoom level.
  9. Reset Graph: Reset the graph to the initial stage. All your actions are undone e.g. hiding, grouping, moving, collapsing nodes, etc.
  10. Search Items: Search items in the graph by their name or id. Matched items will be highlighted and you can navigate to all the matched items using the controls from the search panel.

Context Menu

You access the context menu by right-clicking on the canvas.

  • By left-clicking and dragging on the canvas, you can move around the graph. If you click on a node you can drag that node around.
  • You can scroll to zoom in/out in the graph
  • You can select nodes by clicking on them. Hold shift if you want to select multiple items. You can also box-select items by holding shift to start your selection from the canvas.

Single Node

If you right-click on a node you'll find these menu items in the context menu

  • Hide the item. If you hide any items, it'll enable the unhide-all button and you can use that to bring back the hidden items.
  • Highlight the neighboring items and also highlight the path to the root.
  • Hide, collapse and expand all the parents and children of that node; pretty neat, right?
  • Open the detail view or open the lineage of that item

Selected Nodes

Almost the same as the single node where you have multiple selected nodes and then you do the actions on top of them.

Grouped Nodes

You can ungroup, collapse, and expand the grouped nodes as you've seen in the demonstration.

Nodelist

Only visible in 'fullscreen mode', the node list appears at the bottom of the canvas and shows additional information on certain nodes. There are three different node lists. (i) Selected Nodes, (ii) Matched Nodes, and (iii) Hidden Nodes.

Nodelist
Figure: Tabular view of different node-lists

This is a view-only mode and thus no actions will be causing any change in the actual data.