Integrating discrete-heatmap2d

[nicolaskruchten]

@ordiology has patched gl-heatmap2d to implementing discretization, which could be used to resolve #2924 by implementing zsmooth on heatmapgl (i.e. enabling it to be set to false)... Let's help them prepare a PR to get this functionality exposed in Plotly.js.

[archmoj]

Thaks @ordiology. Would you mind opening a PR from your heatmap-gl fork to this dev-branch?

[archmoj]

Right now there are conflicts between @ordiology 's gl-heatmap2d and gl-vis repo. Those should be resolved before merging to master. So I thought one could attempt fixing them on a dev branch by adding commits on top, instead of touching @ordiology's original commits. Once this step is completed we canl publish new gl-heatmap2d and could use that to provide zsmooth options in the plotly.js API.

[ordiology]

Thank you @archmoj ,

I have resolved the conflict (it was the package-lock.json). However, I'm not sure you want to just pull in my branch at this point. The version of the heatmap-gl that I have made is to link with our scientists' platform. I chose to make as minimal changes to the plotly source code as possible to get a discretised heatmap to work for our scientists. I considered renaming my version of the gl-heatmap2d code and creating a new npm package that could be sourced using a separate trace tree in plotly, but I wasn't sure this would be a productive way to implement the option. So, instead, I kept the linking to the gl-heatmap2d through plotly.js exactly the same and changed the manner in which the gl-heatmap2d code operated on the data and simply linked to a local version of my edited gl-heatmap2d rather than the default npm package. This wouldn't work for proper implementation purposes as a zsmooth switch is required to choose between each implementation.

If there's a better way to communicate rather than in github messages, I can send you more information about how I approached the issue and further discuss what would be the simplest way to effect integration of my solution. I'm happy to help any way that I can.

[archmoj]

@ordiology thanks for the quick fixup.
I don't think we need a separate package. Instead we need to expand gl-heatmap2d to handle both cases (i.e. by passing different options). I am working on other items for a patch release this week. But let's investigate the minimal changes to make that possible.