Show minimized edges

[keyserj]

Describe your issue

When I have a large diagram, I often create views with certain nodes hidden, so that certain aspects of the diagram can be focused on. But if a connecting node is hidden, that can create islands of nodes, losing some context where two nodes are actually connected through a node being hidden.

Solution you'd like

A toggle option to show minimized edges, like so:

rather than the current strategy, which just hides all the edges, creating islands:

Questions:

• should all hidden paths be shown, or just a max of one path (shortest) between the nodes?
  • multiple paths might not work well because they'd result in two edges between the same two nodes, which isn't yet possible in Ameliorate
  • using only one path would solve the islanding problem but still hides some contextual information
• what to do about paths that change directions? e.g. solution -has-> component, obstacle -obstacle-of-> component, with component hidden
  • in this case, due to the component relation, it seems ideal to show obstacle -obstacle-of-> solution; but in general this seems hard to figure out and probably just ok to let the obstacle be islanded or manually tied as obstacle of the solution

Alternatives you've considered

No response

Additional context

• this might eliminate the need for automatically creating edges for component relations
  • and actually might be better, since without these, implied component edges wouldn't exist/need to be hidden in the first place
• this also would help with the question of "to show detriments above or below solutions?"
  • because a downside of showing detriments above is that, if detriments have a creates or created-by relation to benefits/effects, then they can't be easily visually separated from benefits/neutral effects; showing minimized edges would allow quickly using the "hide benefit/effect node types" functionality to visually focus on detriments, without losing the causal chain and creating a confusing island to the detriments

Technical ideas and questions

• probably just check (during layout) all pairs of displayed nodes for if there are no displayed paths but are hidden paths
  • if there are hidden paths, create an edge of type MinimizedEdge that has the path (list of edges?) between the nodes, and have the MinimizedEdge component show the labels of each hidden edge
• could use Dijkstra's shortest path algo, there's probably a library with that method somewhere