Feasibility of a graph view feature/extension

Help / Discuss
1

Hi,

I’m not well versed in coding for XWiki but I was wondering if its feasible to create a graph view similar to what obsidian.m, a note taking app, using XWiki’s current codebase?

Here’s an image for reference.

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image1363×771 112 KB

Best Regards,
Leon

2

I’m not aware of an implementation of this feature as an XWiki extension.

Since recently, all the links between pages are indexed in solr. I guess a combination of those datas combined with a front-end graph library should do the job.

@tmortagne is handling some documentation improvement on solr. We’ll get back to you with more details.

PS: I’m using obsidian for note taking myself :slight_smile:

3

So the easiest to navigate links is to use the Document/XWikiDocument API (which provide APIs to get links and backlinks of a given document) but that means loading every single document in the graph so if you are planning on building big graphs it’s probably not the best in terms of performances.

As @mleduc suggested, a more complex (but much better for performances) alternative is to directly request the indexed links, either:

  • the old database index in XWik < 14.8
  • the new Solr index in XWiki > 14.8 (which I highly recommend since the other one is deprecated and has important limitations)
4

I’ve just proposed basically this idea as a Google Summer of Code project. Note that XWiki has not yet applied for Google Summer of Code 2023 as organization applications are open from January 23 to February 7 but if you should qualify for Google Summer of Code and XWiki is accepted, feel free to get in touch and apply.