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ricklupton / floweaver

View flow data as Sankey diagrams
https://floweaver.readthedocs.io
MIT License
448 stars 89 forks source link

SankeyData.to_json() uses the wrong format #54

Open yourselvs opened 6 years ago

yourselvs commented 6 years ago

The SankeyData's to_json method will always return Json in a widget format. The 'format' and 'metadata' fields are missing, and the 'order' field is included, even if there is no "format" argument passed into the method. The output also has single quotes instead of double quotes, False instead of false, and uses parenthesis for 'order' tuples instead of brackets.

ricklupton commented 6 years ago

Hi, thanks for the report. The to_json method needs better documentation and is still experimental. What are you trying to do?

If you're False where you're expecting false, I guess that's because to_json returns a Python diction that's ready to be serialised to JSON -- not a JSON string. Maybe it's a bad name. You can write it to a file using something like

with open(filename, 'wt') as f:
    json.dump(sankeydata.to_json(), f)
yourselvs commented 6 years ago

My goal was just to get a JSON representing the Sankey diagram. What came out was good enough, and easy enough to format, but I didn't know what the 'format' or 'metadata' fields were used for or if they should've been showing up.

ricklupton commented 6 years ago

Makes sense. Hopefully we can tidy all this up and document it soon (contributions welcome!)

The format field is intended to keep track of the format, inspired by the Jupyter notebook format.

metadata includes the title and authors of the diagram (optionally) and information about how it should be laid out (layers) which are not a necessary part of the data itself.