DCM Notes for 2024-05-13

[glopesdev]

Issues

• Stack overflow exception from VisualizerMapping with second VisualizerMapping as input #1769
• Consider whether dashed producers should be allowed to flow into other dashed producers #1790

We had a long discussion about these two issues and concluded that it probably will make sense to allow for mapping nodes into other nodes. For this we will need to make sure we have semantics in place for all possible combinations, including when visualizer mappings get mapped onto themselves by means of visualizer propagation rules.

We can already detect and handle correctly most edge cases, with the biggest question mark being how to deal with overlaying visualizers onto themselves using VisualizerMapping nodes specifying different visualizer types.

• Mismatched layout file terminates workflow with error when using 'visualizermapping' #1340

We discussed how to handle layout files when mismatched types get assigned together. The hope is we can detect this early and reset the layout file, but validation might not be entirely trivial and can be blind to some structural changes. One possibility is to add a new editor feature to explicitly reset the layout file.

Documentation

• Enable support for compressed XRefMap from documentation server #1788

We discussed the impact of this recently merged PR which should dramatically improve the performance for retrieving xrefmap.yml files from larger websites, and allow us to simply merge all package technical reference documentation into a single website at bonsai docs.

We also discussed approaches for distributing development of package examples and conceptual documentation, which should remain for now in each of the packages' repository, together with an environment for running specific examples.

Tutorials will for now be left in the main website as-is, but one solution for scaling them to more complex examples might be to create dedicated repos and consider improving navigation structure to finding relevant tutorials. Some quick experiments with the DocFX search feature seem to suggest that this wouldn't be enough to help people find relevant documentation.