Provenance core

Javascript library to create and manipulate a provenance graph. The provenance graph can be used as a non-linear undo graph.

API documentation at https://visualstorytelling.github.io/provenance-core/

What does it do?

provenance-core is designed to record and replay user interaction in web applications. Furthermore the aim is to provide tools around it to recombine this interaction history data into slides / stories (see e.g. @visualstorytelling/provenance-tree-visualization and @visualstorytelling/slide-deck-visualization.

For a simple demo, see: provenance-tree-calculator-demo.

How to use it?

If provenance-core is to track the provenance in your application you will need to provide it with user actions. This probably means hooking up your event emitters to a ProvenanceGraph through a ProvenanceTracker. By applying Actions that are mapped to ActionFunctions in an ActionFunctionRegistry, we can build a serializable graph that can undo and replay all actions. ProvenanceTraverser can then be used to go back and forward to any previous/future state: it will figure out the path through the graph and execute all the actions to get to the target Node.

ProvenanceGraphs can be (de-)serialized using serializeProvenanceGraph() and restoreProvenanceGraph() so that they can be stored and retrieved.

Example 1

For a simple example on how to track provenance (in this case, of a basic button) see this JSFiddle

Example 2

Record the actions performed on a simple calculator. Traverse undo graph to any point will undo/redo all actions to get to that point.

import { 
    ActionFunctionRegistry, 
    ProvenanceGraph, 
    ProvenanceGraphTraverser, 
    ProvenanceTracker 
} from '@visualstorytelling/provenance-core';

class Calculator {
    result = 0;
    async add(offset) {
        this.result += offset;
    }
    async subtract(offset) {
        this.result -= offset;
    }
}

async function runme() {
    const calculator = new Calculator();
    const registry = new ActionFunctionRegistry();
    registry.register('add', calculator.add, calculator);
    registry.register('subtract', calculator.subtract, calculator);
    const graph = new ProvenanceGraph({name: 'myapplication', version:'1.2.3'});
    const tracker = new ProvenanceTracker(registry, graph);
    const traverser = new ProvenanceGraphTraverser(registry, graph);

    // Call the add function on the calculator via the provenance tracker
    result = await tracker.applyAction({
        do: 'add',
        doArguments: [13],
        undo: 'subtract',
        undoArguments: [13]
    });
    
    // calculator.result == 13

    // Undo action by going back to parent
    traverser.toStateNode(result.parent.id);

    // calculator.result == 0
}
runme();

Slides / presentations

• ProvenanceSlide
• ProvenanceSlidedeck
• ProvenanceSlidedeckPlayer

User interface

• ProvenanceTreeVisualization: A user interface based on d3 for displaying / navigating through the graph.
• SlidedeckVisualization: A user interface based on d3 for creating presentation slide decks / stories.

Install

npm install @visualstorytelling/provenance-core

Develop

git clone https://github.com/VisualStorytelling/provenance-core.git
cd provenance-core

npm install

NPM scripts

• npm t: Run test suite
• npm start: Run npm run build in watch mode
• npm run test:watch: Run test suite in interactive watch mode
• npm run test:prod: Run linting and generate coverage
• npm run build: Generate bundles and typings, create docs
• npm run lint: Lints code
• npm run commit: Commit using conventional commit style (husky will tell you to use it if you haven't :wink:)

Excluding peerDependencies

On library development, one might want to set some peer dependencies, and thus remove those from the final bundle. You can see in Rollup docs how to do that.

Good news: the setup is here for you, you must only include the dependency name in external property within rollup.config.js. For example, if you want to exclude lodash, just write there external: ['lodash'].

Automatic releases

Prerequisites: you need to create/login accounts and add your project to:

• npm
• Travis CI
• Coveralls

Prerequisite for Windows: Semantic-release uses node-gyp so you will need to install Microsoft's windows-build-tools using this command:

npm install --global --production windows-build-tools

Setup steps

Follow the console instructions to install semantic release and run it (answer NO to "Do you want a .travis.yml file with semantic-release setup?").

npm install -g semantic-release-cli
semantic-release-cli setup
# IMPORTANT!! Answer NO to "Do you want a `.travis.yml` file with semantic-release setup?" question. It is already prepared for you :P

From now on, you'll need to use npm run commit, which is a convenient way to create conventional commits.

Automatic releases are possible thanks to semantic release, which publishes your code automatically on github and npm, plus generates automatically a changelog. This setup is highly influenced by Kent C. Dodds course on egghead.io

Git Hooks

There is already set a precommit hook for formatting your code with Prettier :nail_care:

By default, there are two disabled git hooks. They're set up when you run the npm run semantic-release-prepare script. They make sure:

• You follow a conventional commit message
• Your build is not going to fail in Travis (or your CI server), since it's runned locally before git push

This makes more sense in combination with automatic releases

Release

1. Bump the version in package.json
2. Run npm run build
3. Publish on npmjs 3.1 Login to npmjs with npm login 3.2 npm publish --access public to publish package
4. Create a GitHub release
5. Verify Zenodo entry