proposal: internal front-end for stdcm result viewing #14062
Description
Who would benefit from this feature?
Software developers
What is this feature about?
When we process an STDCM request, we either return "no path found" with no additional data, or a solution with the PDF content. While the PDF is nice, it's difficult to understand why or how we returned a given solution.
Long-term, we plan on creating a specific front-end for "horairistes", the people in charge of actually scheduling the trains. This new page would include a space-time chart and other data.
In the meantime, we can develop an internal-only prototype to visualize all kinds of data about past requests.
Possible features:
- URL accessible from the generated PDF (if the user has the correct access rights of course)
- Space-time and speed charts
- Maps, such as visited map / heatmap
- Dowloadable files to reproduce the request locally, downloadable train schedule
- Some raw data? Like what we currently log to stdout (how far the search went, engineering allowances)
- Maybe some tracing of where we encountered the most blocks / which train blocked it
(yes this is an ideal wish-list, may not be 100% realistic)
Why is this feature valuable?
It would be a lot easier to understand what happened.
This of course helps with debugging, but it can also help with:
- Going through feedback should be a lot easier
- We could even have more interactive exchanges with "horairistes" when they want to talk about a specific output
- Demo should be more interactive and transparent (both for internal demo and produce presentations)
- Some possible issues may be hard to identify without these tools, even for the end users / horairistes