ejaxon
commented
8 years ago Thereby reinventing the Community Narratives Platform :).
In fact, I was thinking about that and it's a key part of the reason I want the Flow and Card pieces as independent as possible. While I do think we'll want to go in that direction for some applications, the issue with the general tree structure is that it definitely increases the complexity for the user and is probably a bad idea for encouraging people to create simple, but flexible narratives. Before going there I want to make sure that we're solving a concrete problem that actually justifies the additional complexity.
The much more constrained concept of interconnected rows came out of thinking about the best way to help people build out a decision tree for screening. However, I think it also works well for simple interactive flows like the ones we're discussing for the CIP project.
However, the main point of separating Cards and Flows (which I discussed in my last response) is to let us build multiple tools that use the cards, with different tools supporting different conceptualizations (sometimes even off the same structure since we can obviously visualize a tree structure both ways). I think we want to build the simpler Flow concept for this initial tool while being on the lookout for opportunities to do the more complicated, but also more general and powerful one that you're talking about.
Define flow as a tree structure emanating from a start node with subsequent children nodes. Then we could use a really cool d3 force layout to explode the tree for editing (https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Force-Layout), and label each node with the card title (http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/950642).
Clicking on a node would enable editing of that card.
Not really what the best UI would be for connecting card actions to target cards. Maybe just selecting a card from from a list by title for a particular action.