Informational Nodes: Legends

In traditional use of Cytoscape, every node is a 'data' node: it represents a molecule or a process, or some other analytical entity.

Just as in map-making, we sometimes want more. You may wish to put up a legend, or some explanatory text, perhaps a prominent label saying, i.e.,

"Time point 3 (8 hours)"
"Low Oxygen"
"Patient 5"

Here is how to do that. As usual, I demonstrate this in the context of the makeSimpleGraph () (see 'methods' for more information about this built-in RCytoscape utility function).

g = RCytoscape::makeSimpleGraph ()
g = graph::addNode ('info.node', g)
nodeData (g, 'info.node', 'label') = 'information will be written here'
window.title = 'Legend Demo'
cw = new.CytoscapeWindow (window.title, graph=g)
displayGraph (cw)
layoutNetwork (cw, "jgraph-spring")
redraw (cw)

# now set up the appearance of the informational node, using a bunch of 'direct' calls
setNodeShapeDirect (cw, 'info.node', 'rect')
setNodeSizeDirect (cw, 'info.node', 140)
setNodeFontSizeDirect (cw, 'info.node', 32);
setNodeLabelDirect (cw, 'info.node', '')
setNodeColorDirect (cw, 'info.node', '#FFEEFF')
fitContent (cw)
redraw (cw)

# now change and update the message in the information node a few times
for (i in 1:10) {
  random.int = as.integer (100 * runif (1))
  new.label = paste ('random label', random.int)
  setNodeLabelDirect (cw, 'info.node', new.label)
  redraw (cw)
  system ('sleep 1')
  }