Since Navigator 4.5.5 suddenly there's an underline color when metadata is filled

[rubinatorz]

hi there!

Since latest 4.5.5 release of the Navigator, all layers suddenly have underlines for techniques:

Before this new Navigator version, you only get an underline when you have filled in a comment. But now, it will also give an underline when having metadata.

I see this is done on purpose in this commit:
bc4ad9f#diff-e49d1d934cc9d96bce820fb261164a66e14c3c90fa2364ff83b6d12201992182

There's now a function getTechniqueUnderlineColor that determines the underline when this condition is true:
tvm.comment.length > 0 || tvm.metadata.length > 0 || this.hasNotes()

Instead of only when no comment is filled in (how it was before):
<span [style.border-color]="configService.getFeature('comment_underline') ? configService.comment_color: ''" [style.color]="getTechniqueTextColor()">

This change has a huge impact. It makes Navigator layers, and thus also the layers of users using DeTT&CT, significantly less attractive and hence less usable for presenting results. See examples beneath how it looks like when you create layers with DeTT&CT.

We propose to undo this change of underlining. Or give a possibility to influence this.

Regards,
Ruben

[clemiller]

Hi @rubinatorz,

Thanks for your comment! You're correct this was a purposeful change - to include an underline on a technique when it has metadata attached. This was a feature we'd previously had on the Navigator long ago, but it was dropped at some point. We re-added it to make it possible to see if metadata exists at a glance. To disable the metadata underline, you can change the comment_underline setting to false in the config file or via the "create customized Navigator" interface. However, this does disable the underline for comments as well, so I definitely agree it would be beneficial to provide a way to influence this behavior.

Since we'd like to retain the underline feature for metadata, I'd propose that we add a new metadata_underline setting in the configuration file that would allow users to separately turn off the underline shown on techniques with assigned metadata. This would de-couple the comment & metadata underline feature and therefore wouldn't impact any comment underline effects that are displayed. I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this & if this would be sufficient to address this issue.

[rubinatorz]

hi @clemiller

I agree having a separate setting for the metadata underline is useful. However, in our opinion it's more useful to influence this settings via the layer JSON (LayerObject). DeTT&CT outputs JSON layers and when loading these you don't want to change the URL every time.

We, and many people I guess, always use the Github hosted version of Navigator, so we are not able to use a custom config file.

Regards,
Ruben