scverse / scverse/spatialdata-plot
Custom title when multiple coordinate system present and no coordinate system specified
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- Dominant language
- Python
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- 86
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- Avg merge
- 14h 50m
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Description
When there is a object with 2 coordinate systems and pl.show() is called without specifying coordinate_systems, by default two subplots are created. If the user adjust the title=, both titles are changed, leading to a plot that is confusing, especially if it was not clear that the object (or an element of the object) was aligned to multiple coordinate systems.
This is exactly what happened in the following plots (that appeared from a bug reported by a user).
before setting the title
after setting the title
not sure why the order changes but no big deal, not the point of this issue
solution for this case
Solution for the user: here the fix is to specify coordinate_systems='global', which will lead to a single plot.
proposed solution
Discussed also with @melorona. I proposed to change the default behavior as follows:
coordinate_systemswill have a new default ofNone.- if the object has a single coordinate system and
coordinate_systemisNone, this will be plotted - elif the object has multiple coordinate system and
coordinate_systemisNoneand one of them is called'global'(defined infrom spatialdata.models._utils import DEFAULT_COORDINATE_SYSTEM), this will be plotted - if
coordinate_systemis notNoneandcoordinate_systemis available, this will be plotted - else (i.e. if
coordinate_systemisNone, multiple coordinate systems are present and none of them is called'global', or ifcoordinate_systemis notNoneand it's not available in the data, then an error will be raised, printing the list of available coordinate systems.
What will change for the user:
- with this change, by default we won't plot multiple coordinate systems; if this is still the desired behavior, the user can still pass a list of coordinate systems.
Extra comments:
- with the incoming "transformations refactoring" it will be required to specify which coordinate system to plot because elements will not contain an explicit list of coordinate systems they are aligned to but there will only be a big graph of transformations where a lot of coordinate systems can be aligned to a lot of other coordinate systems. So it will be important to plot only what the user asks for
- in general, the current default behavior is useful when there are multiple FOVs for a dataset (like in the MIBITOF example dataset); but in other cases where there is the same data in multiple coordinate systems, like in Xenium, or where the number of FOVs is very large, like in CosMx, the currently implemented default behavior is suboptimal, and requiring the proposed new default would be handier.
Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
Start at the pl.show() entry point and trace how coordinate_systems defaults are selected when an object has one or multiple coordinate systems. Done means the default selects the sole system or the global system, raises an error with available systems when no valid default exists, and still allows callers to pass a list explicitly.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- python
- Domain
- data-visualization
- Issue type
- Feature
- Difficulty
- 4/5
- Estimated time
- 3-5 days
- Activity status
- Stale
- Clarity
- Mostly clear
- Newbie friendliness
- 35/100