new features? --depth, --hide-unlinked and --hide-nodes

[fabien-marty]

Hi!

I have (mainly) vide-coded some extra features for "impulse" and I open this issue to see if you are interested in. In that case, I will work a little more on them, and I will open them in this repository.

First feature: --depth=

By default, we have --depth=1 (only immediate descendants of the given package are shown on the graph). This is great for most cases but sometimes you will need a little more depth view.

Example with --depth=1 (default)

Example with --depth=3

Corresponding WIP PR: fabien-marty#2

Second feature: --hide-unlinked

To remove unlinked nodes on the graph:

Corresponding WIP PR: fabien-marty#1

Third feature: --hide-nodes

Sometimes, to simplify the graph you want to hide some nodes (and corresponding links). In the previous example, I want to hide the "utils" package used by every other. But, on a more general way, I added a coma separated list of fnmatch patterns to hide several nodes easily.

Example with --hide-nodes=utils

Example with --hide-nodes=utils,adapters.*.dummy,adapters.*.memory

Corresponding WIP PR: fabien-marty#3

=> What are your feelings about these features? Do you think these would be good additions to this project?

[seddonym]

Hi Fabian,

I'm sorry it's taken me so long to get back to you on this.

I'm definitely interested in adding more of this kind of thing - in fact you are not the first to propose something like this, and only the other week I was talking with a colleague (@TomasBayer) who has also been exploring some of the same things.

As for for the future of Impulse, my intention is to move the project into my other project Import Linter as I think it will work better if they are more cohesive. I have just this minute released the latest version, which has all the features of Impulse, plus an interactive browser-based interface which I hope will open up more opportunities for things like this.

Here are the docs - I hope you like it!
https://import-linter.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ui/

In terms of these specific features it would be good if you had a look at the new UI and have a think about how these different features might fit into it. E.g. perhaps instead of doing it from the command line we could hide modules on a case by case basis - I'm not sure.

Also bear in mind that there is likely to be some overlap with some of @TomasBayer's ideas, so we'll have to figure out how to consolidate them.

[fabien-marty]

interesting!

My primary use case is to automatically generate every night some architecture diagrams and open PR with them.

Example I got today:

I already use and love "import-linter", so it sounds perfectly ok to move this stuff to "import-linter".

Even if my primary use-case is CLI based, it sounds very nice to have these features in an interactive browser!

[fabien-marty]

=> I'm going to review the new integration in "import-linter" and I will propose things in the "import-linter" repository.

[seddonym]

My primary use case is to automatically generate every night some architecture diagrams and open PR with them.

Oh interesting. Well I've included a CLI option too.

https://import-linter.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ui/#drawing-graphs-on-the-command-line

[fabien-marty]

The new browsable web UI in "import-linter" is great BTW! These new features should be great in it!

Nice work!