Auto color ports upon node selection to identify duplicated connections

Feedback & Ideas
1

Hi,

this might actually be a stupid idea but nevertheless wanted to suggest it to elaborate with others if it would actually be a quality of live feature.

If a node has many connections, especially when rewiring them, chances of duplicated connections become increasingly likely. I.e. can you spot on the below screenshot the duplicated connection?

image
image590×776 92 KB

Therefore I’d like to suggest to either:

  1. Color all connections if a node got selected in a sequential order of up to seven easily distinguishable, meaning high contrast, colors (see below) and restart with the first if necessary
  2. Only highlight duplicated connections. Though, if there are multiple, different colors must be used again
  3. Use a dashed line for duplicated colors

As follows the colors I’d suggest starting with high visibility red and continuing with complementing high contrast ones:

  1. Red - A vibrant and bold color, visible against white and in contrast to cyan. RGB: (255, 0, 0).
  2. Cyan - Providing maximum contrast with red, clear and vibrant against white. RGB: (0, 255, 255).
  3. Warm Yellow - Adjusted to be more distinguishable against white, a warm tone that contrasts with cyan. RGB: (255, 223, 0).
  4. Blue - Offers a calming contrast to the warmth of yellow, clear against white. RGB: (0, 0, 255).
  5. Orange - A vibrant, warm color that contrasts with blue and stands out against white. RGB: (255, 165, 0).
  6. Purple - A cool, deep color providing contrast to orange and distinct against white. RGB: (128, 0, 128).
  7. Green - Offers natural vibrancy and stands in contrast to purple, clearly visible against white. RGB: (0, 128, 0).

Best
Mike

2

Hi Mike,

thank you for the feedback.

Do I understand correctly that with “duplicated connections” you mean the two connections between the sole output port of “Create Charts” and two input ports of “Report Concatenate”?

In any case, I personally think colouring would introduce too much visual noise and be problematic w.r.t. accesibility and interaction with other visual components.

Nevertheless I do agree that this can be done better – possibly by highlighting destination ports when the source node is selected. What do you think about that?

Best,
Ben

1 Like
3

Hi @BenjaminMoser,

yes, you got it right. The color-cluttering is what I envisioned as well. That’s why I also listed an intermediate approach of only highlighting duplicated connections to a real node, not a component, though.

The suggestion of yours is what I believe I too mentioned … so two “idiots with the same idea” as we tend to sometimes say in Germany :wink:

Cheers
Mike

4

Nah, we’re being very smart here :wink:

I filed a feature request – I believe improving this would be not too difficult to do (NXT-2544 for internal reference). However, I cannot make guarantees when we will adress this, as we try to batch similar improvements together and are currently working other (certainly just as exciting) things.

Best,
Ben

1 Like
5

He he :wink: Thanks for raising the feature request.