As of the beginning of last week, my second plugin was capable of repositioning the labels of nodes. However, thereafter, whenever I introduced a new node or new edges to the graph, all the labels will move back to their original position. After speaking with my mentors, Gary suggested that I look up the bypass methods and bypass the VizMapper once I’ve changed the positions of my labels.
So for the latter half of last week and yesterday, I continued wrestling with the Cytoscape source code. I’ve found a few ways of repositioning labels, but everytime I tested my plugin, instead of repositioning the labels, the code turned the circle nodes into squares.
Thankfully, I found an old post made by Mike Smoot on the cytoscape-discuss group. With the help of this post, my plugin can finally relocate the labels of nodes and make them stay there!
Throughout this summer, Greg has encouraged us to blog about our progress and solutions to problems we’ve encountered. One important reasons behind this idea is to save others some time if they happen to encounter the same problem. I certainly hope that others will not have to go through all the trouble I did to change the visual properties of nodes and edges.
Now, I can finally start learning some graph drawing algorithms and hopefully work my way towards a layout algorithm for my actual label plugin!
[...] Mui has fewer squares than she used to [...]