I know that Design Explorer is not under the Ladybug Tools team’s responsibilities. However, after searching for previous Design Explorer issues—and now experiencing similar problems myself—I’m struggling to reach any conclusion other than that DE is currently unreliable, at least in its present state.
Looking through the TTToolbox Discourse and the Design Explorer GitHub repository, I see multiple reported issues that have not received responses, and no visible development activity for several years.
Even examples that used to work, as examples previously shared on this forum, no longer function properly.
In my most recent attempt, nothing appears on the screen at all:
The maximum functionality I can get is opening the data.csv file locally. The graph appears, but the images do not.
This brings me to a broader question:
I’ve read about the possibility of developing an alternative user interface to Design Explorer. How realistic is this option at the moment?
From my experience, DE is (or at least was) very popular among LBT users—certainly among those I work with—so it would be helpful to understand the current outlook.
I know that sooner or later someone will ask this question : )
Last month, I updated the Design Explorer example of the pollination app and added some localization processing. This enabled users to preview their diverse cases locally before the cloud platform upload function was fully implemented. This had been shared within our Chinese community previously. You can obtain the locally ready application from this repository. We also provide a local Web Demo for testing some projects that are not convenient to set up locally.
I’m grateful this post gives me the opportunity to showcase it to a wider audience. Your testing is also welcome—the project’s web demo is hosted on a small server, accessible via this link.
What sets it apart from other design explorer projects is its support for .zip format uploads. It automatically extracts the data.csv file and image assets from the zip. While I haven’t recorded a new tutorial, it seamlessly integrates with the output from the Pollination Fly component. You can check out Mostapha’s demonstration on YouTube:
Thanks @ZhengrongTao !!
Really appreciate your initiative to bring this to be more up to date.
Going to your github i had some difficulties to install. From your response to @sarith i see there is an interface already working. I’m testing the local option from ZIP file. It is a bit slow, but I manage to load the graph. I have 2 images per option. The interface uploads only the first one. Is it possible to set more than one?
Thanks again for this very nice alternative to DE.
-A.
I
We’re glad you managed to run some cases successfully on our small server. However, its performance is limited, so I’d recommend setting up your environment locally instead.
My readme wasn’t clear enough.each release includes a click-to-run program packaged by our community users. You should be able to run it on your computer and follow the prompts to preview your local pages.This program is automatically packaged by the workflow provided by @QiH .
You’re right.my current solution doesn’t support previewing multiple images. but i should be able to address this within one or two updates. I expect to resolve this issue today or tomorrow. However, I’d appreciate a sample dataset. May I use the files you attached in your post as test cases?
I just pushed an update that lets you toggle between the previous or next image sequence using buttons, for previewing multiple sets of images. this update isn’t particularly elegant, and I still see a few minor issues. But I hope this solution will temporarily address the problem until I figure out a better way to display them.
Regarding the requirement to bold selected line segments, I’ve tried multiple approaches, but none successfully bolded the corresponding segments in the selected image. I’ll document this requirement for now and address it when I have sufficient time.
Very nice! This is great to see. I’m adding @mikkel here who developed the Dash version of the DesignExplorer. Maybe he can provide guidance on the remaining items on the list for highlighting the selection.
