Hi folks - what is the recommended way to visualize a large flow ?

Hi @Marwan Sarieddine - flows can be visualized using the UI schematics (the Schematics tab for a given flow) or by calling

flow.visualize()

on your flow object in Prefect Core, which will give you a PDF visualization of your flow. Note: this requires that you have

graphviz

installed on your machine.

Hi @nicholas - thank you for taking the time to respond. yes I am aware of the UI and

visualize()

but when my flow is too big, rendering the flow becomes very slow or error prone (for instance the pdf reader throws errors that it cant fit the flow - Acrobat reader’s error message is:

The dimensions of this page are out-of-range. Page content might be truncated.)

and chrome has a hard time showing the schematic … (spinner wheel keeps spinning and then chrome freezes … ) I am wondering if visualize() or the UI takes parameters to help show independent sections of the flow if possible ? (easier said than done) - I suppose with the UI I can try to visualize one task at a time, not sure how smooth the experience is to go through the different tasks … (So with the UI, I’d have to go to flow-> tasks -> choose a task -> visualize it, however to move to the second task, I have to go back to tasks and choose a task … )

Ah I understand - at this time the UI doesn't have a way to easily navigate through sections of a flow though it's definitely something we've considered. I think the individual task dependency graphs are your best bet for the moment, even with their limitations, since they'll allow you to visualize your upstream and downstream dependencies. You might try navigating through your flow by searching for individual tasks using the search bar (in the top nav of that app), which will take you directly to their pages

Hi @nicholas - yea I agree - it seems the best bet now is to look at a single task and trace its dependencies - somewhat like a manual depth-first traversal of the flow ... thanks for sharing the GitHub link - I’ll try to follow up with a proposal hopefully