Another non-trivial request:
Could we get an operation to generate a (PDF) listing of experiment settings?
One listing for any number of selected experiments would be nice.
An additional bonus: a checkbox to include/exclude fields that still have their default values.
I’m assuming you are talking about from a BehaviorSpace experiments. Can you explain the use case more? I’m not sure what this would be useful for.
The reason I brought this up is that I am looking into a model with dozens of experiments. Then opening the experiments one by one and scrolling through the various fields is quite tedious.
Finding the sometimes subtle differences between experiments is even harder.
So, I thought having one listing of a subset of experiments would make life easier.
One listing per experiment would already be very helpful.
I realize that this feature will not be implemented overnight, so for the short term I will need something else.
It seems to me that future NetLogo users could benefit from this idea as well.
Is there a particular reason why it should be a PDF? If it was something like CSV, it would be pretty much trivial.
Oh, another format would do as well. I can do the printing to PDF.
As an example, I have made a CSV for all experiments of the Wolf Sheep Predation model.
With a tiny bit of formatting in a spreadsheet program, I generated the corresponding PDF.
Another option would be HTML, for which I made a really quick-and-dirty (and partial) example.
Just to give an idea what I had in mind…
Wolf Sheep Predation-experiments.csv (5.7 KB)
Wolf Sheep Predation-experiments_html.txt (1.4 KB)
Wolf Sheep Predation-experiments.pdf (157.6 KB)
Experiments are currently stored in the model file as XML that looks quite similar to the HTML you provided. You can also acquire this XML by exporting the experiments from the BehaviorSpace dialog in the app. Would this not solve the problem? It could possibly be converted from that form to HTML or CSV or something similar, if the XML itself doesn’t suffice.
Hi Isaac,
There are two aspects here. I’ll reply to the more technical one first.
My experience with more technical aspects of HTML is limited. I have seen something like defining how to render XML inside HTML but I don’t know the details. This might be an easy solution for part of the problem.
Apart from that, I would be able to parse the XML, or traverse a DOM, to gather all information.
But it is not something I am doing daily.
For direct use, the experiment XML is too technical.
And then still, I would like to see the field “Vary variables…” in the same format as in the experiment definition window.
This is quite different from the XML representation with tags <constants> and <subExperiment> and their parts.
Without further information, I would not be able to make this translation.
For my immediate needs, I can make a quick-and-dirty not-so-perfect solution.
If it is not too much work generating something like the CSV format above, I would appreciate if you put it on your list.
Hi Isaac,
After the discussion so far, I realize that this issue might not be too urgent for most users.
I should have thought a bit longer before posting this feature request.
This is the first time I encountered a model with so many experiments.
With just a handful of experiments, opening them one by one would still be feasible.
In the examples library, I found just three models with more than 5 experiments.
So, if applicability of the feature is limited, it does not have a high priority.