Highlight Connections

[mhechthz]

Hi,

I have complex workflows with many in- and out-going connections between nodes. To control all connection one has to select every single connection to see where it comes from and goes to. I would really appreciate if one could configure to highlight all in- and out-going connections to and from the node on selection of the node. The connections could get a higher line thickness or another color or shadows.

[dceejay]

as a workaround you can use shift-click on the pin and move the wires slightly - this will move all of them and this will highlight them all - of course you then have to drop them back onto the pin to reconnect them all (or use Ctl/cmd-z if you accidentally delete them

[mhechthz]

Hmmm ... I've up to 10 ingoing connections and up to 5 outgoing connections per node, with about 50 to 100 connections in total, all crossing each other - this is a lot of clicking that taks a lot of time. This I wanted to avoid with this feature request. Maybe it can be implemented in a coming version of node-red.

[dceejay]

though you would have to click the node anyway ? so shift click is not so much harder. If this was implemented it would not be the default click anyway, and so would require some modifier.

[mhechthz]

For ingoing connections this might be workaround, but for outgoing connections with heavy crossing or parallel running of/to other connections it is almost impossible to see where it goes. So I need to click all outgoing pins or connections. And this for some/many nodes.

Highligting all connections from and to the node by just selecting the node, seems to be very "natural" for me, isn't it.

[TotallyInformation]

One of the ways I work around this is to apply a naming convention on the link nodes then you can review the node names to see where everything goes.

So a link in node that goes to MQTT out might be named -> MQTT perhaps. Then any link out nodes that connect there might be named data xxxx -> MQTT or whatever makes sense to you.

[mhechthz]

Sounds interesting, but than I'm forced to look into the code and apply some searching. This would also be an unwanted additional effort.

My feature request and your workaround seems to be slightly related to another one (I don't remeber where I saw this) where there was requested some introspection functionality for connections/links, i.e. reading the number of outgoing links from a function. One could easily extend this by not only reading the number of inks but also the names of the connected nodes.

[TotallyInformation]

@mhechthz

than I'm forced to look into the code and apply some searching. This would also be an unwanted additional effort.

Actually, you can see them in the sidebar

And the magnifying glass lets you navigate between them.

Not saying that your idea doesn't have some merit, this is only a work around.