Some ideas for improvement

Remark:
For navigating in your model you can also use the model explorer (left upper window). Double-clicking on an entry in the tree structure will display and highlight the respective object in your diagram. You can see the input (-->) and output flows (<--) of processes and if the respective processes are subsystems (name is displayed in blue color).

Additionally, you can use the search function by pressing CTRL + f. Enter a search term, select the fields and elements to be searched and click Search. Select the desired object from the appearing list in the Trace Output window (bottom). The selected object will be highlighted in the System diagram. If it is an internal part of a subsystem, a new window will be opened.

The navigation using find or the model explorer is certainly a good feature.
But it can only be used if one has the software and the model in front of him.

In the end, the results of the modelling will go into a report with the diagrams and tables with data.
It is there that the indexing of flows and other data becomes more important, especially with large numbers of flows.

As an aside, do you have a public timeline for planned changes/upgrades to the application?

Best regards,

Geert

Good point, I will think about it.
We don't have a public timeline for planned changes/upgrades. As we are not earning money with STAN, we need to raise funding (normally as part of projects we are working on here at our institute) to be able to implement additional features from our wish list. Unfortunately, at the moment, there is no budget to make major adjustments to our software.
In the download section under documentation you can find a list of features that have been implemented in the last versions of STAN.
BR,
Oliver

Hello Oliver,

I have been working further on my water model and listed a few extra suggestions for improvement.
The application is very useful, thanks again for sharing this.

Possible improvements:
- Sortable flow and proces index: see also previous suggestion;
- Subsystem reference: see also previous suggestion;
- Sankey arrow max width: currently dictated by largest value in all subsystems, making it hard to get some resolution if you have one subsystem with large value, would be handy to have one extra option to give an overall maximum width for all subsystems (so largest flow in each subsystem (diagram) has the same visual width), one can than always tweak with the slider;
- Negative values: currently model produces negative values, would be good to have an option to prevent this (no negative value allowed);
- Print: option to print all open diagrams (so all subsystems if open);
- Navigation in subsystems: not possible via explorer, possible option is using datacrumbs on top of diagram and maybe always only show one diagram;
- k-value in data explorer: show column in data explorer with k-value (standard score).


Best regards,

Geert

Thanks for sharing your pretty interesting ideas to improve STAN!

Hello Oliver,

I understand that you don't have the time or funds to continuously upgrade the software when users suggest improvements.

I saw that the application was developed in Microsoft.Net, C#, Winforms and Visual Studio.
This is a common programming environment.

Is there a possibility that the code could be made open source, so users can make forks with improvements?


Best regards,

Geert