Siren Platform User Guide

The Graph Browser panel allows the user to change configurations through the sidebar on the right. In the three tabs of the sidebar, the user can change Lenses, Expansions, and Selections.

In the Lenses tab, you can add lenses, change the selected lens, remove one or more lenses, and modify lens settings.

In the Expansions tab, you can check/uncheck the dashboard filters, check/uncheck the simple and the aggregated relations filters, and change aggregated relations options.

In the Selection tab, the selected graph items are shown in a grid; you can hide columns, sort rows in a different order, by type and so on.

When a configuration is modified, a Save button appears in the top right of the sidebar.

If you switch to another dashboard without saving, and come back to the Graph Browser, the sidebar state remains the same: all configuration changes are kept and the Save button is still highlighted. In addition, the sidebar width and state (opened or closed) are kept. If you leave the session (log out) without saving the configurations, the next time you log in and open the Graph Browser, the configurations will be lost.

If click the Save button, the current configurations are saved in the uiStateJSON of the saved visualizations object related to the Graph Browser visualization.

The structure of the saved JSON enables different configurations for the Graph Browser in different dashboards. All the configurations are stored under an id related to the dashboard id.

Cloning a Graph Browser dashboard

On the Graph Browser dashboard, click the Clone button in the top right. A dialog appears that allow to choose the title of the new cloned dashboard.

Type a name and click the Confirm Clone button. This creates a new Dashboard with all the same configurations.

The same happens if you click the Edit button (top right) and then save the dashboard as new. It is possible to change the new dashboard configurations and save it; the original Graph Browser configurations will not change.

You can run a script within Graph Browser to determine the shortest path between selected nodes in a dataset.

The time to calculate the shortest path is dependent on the size and schema of the dataset. With this script, the ability to calculate the shortest path is limited by the graph expansion limit. You can modify this setting (siren:graphExpansionLimit), which is documented in Setting advanced options.

If you are working with Neo4j data, you can use a Neo4j Shortest Path script instead, which should provide better performance. See Adding a Shortest Path script for Neo4j for details.

There are a number of operators which can be applied to the payload data for transformation, comparison, and so on.

Here are a selection, there are further details at the Jexl GitHub page.

Operators. Use these operators to perform mathematical operations on values

Comparisons. Use these expressions to compare two values, the Boolean results can be used for, for example filtering.

Conditional Operators. Conditional operators return the second or third expression based on the result of the first expression. If the first expression ("Bob" in ["Bob", "Mary"] below) return true, "Yes" is returned. If it returns false, "No" is returned.

Identifiers. Access variables in the payload with dot notation or by using brackets, for example:

{
  name: {
    first: 'John'
    last: 'Smith'
  },
  age: 55,
  colleagues: [
    'Mary',
    'Bob',
    'Ted'
  ],
  teammate: 2
}

Collection filtering. Arrays of objects (Collections) can be filtered by including a filter expression in brackets. Properties of each collection can be referenced by prefixing them with a leading dot. The result is an array of objects for which the filter returns a truthy value.

{
  users: [
    { first: 'John', last: 'Smith', age: 20},
    { first: 'Mary', last: 'Jones', age: 46},
    { first: 'Ted', last: 'Cotter', age: 16},
    { first: 'Bob', last: 'White', age: 66}
  ],
  adult: 21
}

Lens Expression Functions

In addition to the general Jexl parsing functionality, Siren Investigate also exposes a number of JavaScript-like functions for use in Lens Expressions. Payload values (or the results from earlier parsing) are piped into the function using the | character. These values become the val parameter for the functions below - meaning the val does not need to be added in the () after the function name. In some cases, this value is all that is needed by the function and some functions require extra parameters.

Some functions require string inputs and some require integer or floating-point inputs

Siren enables you to group nodes manually or automatically based on shared properties, for example:

This can reduce graph clutter and make it easier to discover patterns and drill down into clusters during analysis.

For example, the following image shows companies clustered by US state in which their headquarters are located.