Basic drawing tools in NR editor

I am quite surprised of how little appraisal this has received. This feature would be immensely useful. Also the execution looks extremely polished. Awesome work!

I've been wanting to document my flows to assist seeing the logical grouping of nodes. The he existing comment node seems to just clutter up the flow even more so I've stopped using it. It does not visually stand up enough for it to be useful. .

Agreed, very useful, but other priorities I guess. :expressionless:

There is certainly a bit of art involved with laying out a neat flow. I couldn't live without plenty of comment nodes though.

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Some food for thought;

It would be great if it was possible to resize the comment node as a "border" around a flow (perhaps with custom background color and hidden icon as it doesn't add much value to the node)

This comes up on a fairly regular basis. However, I think that most of us would prefer a "group" node so that the nodes it contains move about together.

To be honest though, even one that didn't interact with the nodes but, as you say, had a resizable border would be useful.

Not sure whether it is worth overloading the comment node for that though. Might be better for it to be a separate node - after all, all nodes now inherit a comment tab.

The Node-RED Trello board is a useful place to see what might already be on the roadmap for future releases:

Also, don't forget that you can use a subflow to group nodes together as well. Although they are designed for reusability, you don't have to reuse it.

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also discussed:

and

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I assume that to contribute something of this nature, one would have to know something about D3? I can't imagine it would be that easy to do.

Yes, but some of us (ok, maybe only me) wanted the ability to be able to "draw" on/in the Editor as well. Nothing fancy, but enough to add text, some flowchart symbols, and basic line drawing tools. Throw in some colour as well, and ...:boom:

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Regarding grouping nodes by using subflows: a had found some ideas on the node-red wiki some time ago, there was this concept of inline-subflows -- I interpreted them as singleton subflows that don't clutter the palette.

All in all, some grouping mechanism like that would really increase readability of larger projects. You could lay out the general structure of your flows with a few of these inline-subflows, and then "zoom in", if you need the details.

Just some ideas, but be careful not to end up with something like LabView. :grin:

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Well, I've only seen LabView once but I was quite impressed, out of my price-range of course :slight_smile:

It is used in some projects by our company (mechanical and plant engineering) for measuring and process supervision. Very impressive indeed, but very complex, too.

Ah, that explains why our LabView guys are always saying "LabView for poor people" when they see me using Node-RED in our projects. :joy:

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Yes, I saw it at a local engineering company here in Sheffield that make sensors for the oil industry - my son managed to bag a work experience week with them and I couldn't resist having a nose (much to his disgust :smile:). I was surprised to see them building IoT microprocessor logic using a visual tool. Nice.

Reasonable price for its intended audience I guess - their use case needed at least the "Full" license as they were programming FPGA's.

https://www.ni.com/en-gb/shop/labview/select-edition.html

LabView equivalent sounds like the way to go. Who do we need to speak to here? :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

It is a very different beast in reality and the cost indicates the investment in development and support. So if you wanted to have something similar, you would need to start investing money in the project - perhaps funding some developers :smile:

Of course, you can also contribute yourself as well by writing code or updating documentation.

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And the software license is only a part of it... don't forget the appropriate hardware like industrial PCs, extension cards for measuring and so on...

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Would love to, but my coding days are from a different era, C, Modula-2, Ada etc. This newfangled JS stuff often does my head in.

Well, I think Node-RED is an impressive platform and is only getting better and better from release to release.

I have been using it for personal projects at home since v0.10 in 2015, I think.
Two years ago I introduced it at work for use in industrial projects, doing all kinds of communication with PLCs, data handling and SCADA like stuff. Productivity has improved a lot since then. :+1:

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It took me some time to get over the lack of types and compile time assistance you get from typed languages.

After just a few months, I dreaded the thought of going back to explicitly declaring types up front, no being able to add properties to an object by simply .prop = value and the simplicity of serialisation in js is excellent. Don't get me wrong, it still annoys me at times but the benefits do outweigh the struggles.

You should find a gap in the contrib nodes and crack on. Perhaps an ultra flexible number convertor for bits, bytes, hex conversion, octal, etc (I've seen tonnes of how to convert 2 bytes to integer, how to set bit 3 of a WORD, how to split 16bit into two bytes etc)

That would be pretty sweet. I'm imagining something like a html group box that can be collapsed into a descriptive title (multiline of course)

Also like the idea of more flexible comment box. Multiline for starters. Adjustable colours?
Resizable too to make things line up (OCD) :slight_smile:

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as per Add a 'line break' function by YumaMatsuura · Pull Request #2242 · node-red/node-red · GitHub ...

and Add support for specifying subflow template color by HiroyasuNishiyama · Pull Request #2225 · node-red/node-red · GitHub ... (for subflows)

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