Graph visualisation

[smartine-ledger]

Hi,

Do you plan to add the feature allowing to export the graph and so visualise it ?

Thank you

[gabrielittner]

I'm planning to look into this in the next months as part of picking up some FlowRedux topics. What would be interesting to know is what kind of things you would like to see in the visualization and get out of it.

The reason of why I'm asking is that there are different approaches that have different limitations:

1. Do it based on the spec. This would not allow visualizing something like when action foo is received in state a transitions to state b, because that happens in your code and not directly in the DSL.
2. Similar to 1 but do it with a tool that reads the source code (like a compiler frontend plugin or something like android lint). This might allow us to figure out some of the state transitions, but also would not be able to properly cover everything, especially when action handling has conditional logic where you could transition to multiple states.
3. Generate something at runtime when the state machine is executed (of course not always on). So the visualization could be generated as part of tests or when debugging something. This would have the limitation of only visualizing parts that were executed, but the parts that were executed could be very detailed.

It might also be possible to combine 1 and 3 so that 3 has some basic info about the parts that weren't executed, but it all depends on what someone wants to get out of it.

[smartine-ledger]

Nice 🙂 . For me the idea of visualising the graph will be the kind of thing we can find in xtate or kstatemachine