Feature: improve support for visualizing system traces

[exinton]

Needs ability to display json message with proper indentation

Expected Behavior

The message should display the json format message with proper indentation for better human reading

Current Behavior

The parsing function will ignore white space and newline, as well as center text align.

Possible Solution

add options in the web ui and cli for user to select weather to ignore white space, new line and how the text is aligned.

Steps to Reproduce (for bugs)

A sample txt input is attached

Context

If just passing the title of the message, then the mscgen.js provides very few information to the reader. However, if I want to put the whole json in the label, it's really hard to read now. Now I have to modify the svg file itself to make it not ignore space, and text-aligned to left

We tried to display the system call between modules with mscgen

Your Environment

• Version used: 1.13.0
• Browser Name and version: chrome 64.0.3282.186
• Operating System and version (desktop or mobile):windows
• Link to your project: N/A sample.txt

[sverweij]

First of my apologies for the super long delay in responding to this issue.

Although I know mscgenjs is used for visualising traces (and/ or documenting flows including complete messages), it was not its first design goal. As a consequence the stylesheets that are included and the little design decisions that influence the rendering are geared towards systems modelling - as you discovered.

The way I intend to solve it is

• Broaden the number of the things that can be influenced by a stylesheets.
• Provide a stylesheet that's geared towards documenting system traces. Such a stylesheet should
  • by default left-align text in notes (and possibly boxes)
  • ignore white space in messages
  • use a fixed space font (e.g. courier)
• It probably needs some changes in the way mscgen source is parsed as well.

These are not changes I can make overnight (my spare time is limited and the code base is in need of some love regardless of any features) - but I'll place em on the backlog .