- Back in 2009 Joseph Guillaume worked with me on a complicated workflow
- He came up with this python script to help keep track of the steps
- The simple text file is a list of transformations, inputs and output
- It is converted to the right format and graphviz creates a html page with pop-outs
Simple text list
Transformation
description
the thing
inputs
the thing before
another thing
output
the next thing
notes
the thing is this other thing this is a really long description
blah blah asdfasdfasdfasdfasdfa
Transformation
description
yet another thing
inputs
the next thing
output
a final thing
notes
this is a note
- keep this in your work directory and update it whenever you add a step to the workflow
- the list can be as big as you like (hundreds of steps), and entered in any order, the inputs/output relationships determine how the graph looks at the end
- to run the script just do the one line
Python code: run
python transformations.py workflow_steps.txt index
- open the html page and click on a square box to bring up the pop-out
- short text is shown, long text is replaced by an ellipse and only shown in pop-out
Conclusions
- I’ve popped the script up as a Github repo
- The example is in the gh-pages branch
