Loader skewer selection by haticekaratay · Pull Request #3962 · spacetelescope/jdaviz

haticekaratay · 2025-12-25T01:13:44Z

Description

This PR adds a new skewer selection mode for interactive footprint selection in the loaders infrastructure. The skewer mode selects footprints by evaluating whether a clicked sky coordinate lies within a footprint’s spherical polygon, and is available in addition to the existing nearest-edge footprint selection behavior.

This work was initially developed for the Footprints plugin (see #3794), but has since been refactored and integrated into the loaders infrastructure. By implementing this in loaders, the skewer selection mode is now available wherever loader-based footprint selection is used.

Screen.Recording.2026-01-20.at.1.55.09.PM.mov

To make it easier to visualize how the skewer selection mode works, check the demo with well-separated footprints.
When clicking inside overlapping footprints, the skewer mode automatically selects the one with the smallest polygon area. This ensures that when a smaller footprint is nested within a larger one, clicking in the overlap region will correctly select the more specific (smaller) footprint.

Screen.Recording.2026-01-20.at.3.06.50.PM.mov

Change log entry

Is a change log needed? If yes, is it added to CHANGES.rst? If you want to avoid merge conflicts,
list the proposed change log here for review and add to CHANGES.rst before merge. If no, maintainer
should add a no-changelog-entry-needed label.

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Are two approvals required? Branch protection rule does not check for the second approval. If a second approval is not necessary, please apply the trivial label.
Do the proposed changes actually accomplish desired goals? Also manually run the affected example notebooks, if necessary.
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Are tests added/updated as required? If so, do they follow the STScI Style Guides?
Are docs added/updated as required? If so, do they follow the STScI Style Guides?
If new remote data is added that uses MAST, is the URI added to the cache-download.yml workflow?
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Is a milestone set? Set this to bugfix milestone if this is a bug fix and needs to be released ASAP; otherwise, set this to the next major release milestone. Bugfix milestone also needs an accompanying backport label.
After merge, any internal documentations need updating (e.g., JIRA, Innerspace)?

kecnry

Exciting to see this all come together!

I wonder if it makes sense since this is in a custom/temporary toolbar to NOT nest these in a single dropdown?
Are there plans for skewer with multiselect (all intersecting footprints get added/removed from the selection)? How would that fit into this?

jdaviz/core/tools.py

haticekaratay · 2026-01-21T20:05:31Z

Exciting to see this all come together!

I wonder if it makes sense since this is in a custom/temporary toolbar to NOT nest these in a single dropdown?

Are there plans for skewer with multiselect (all intersecting footprints get added/removed from the selection)? How would that fit into this?

Good feedback. An update for the flattened version is on the way.
For this PR, I focused on transferring the logic, but I’d be happy to include the multi-select functionality as a follow-up.

kecnry · 2026-01-21T20:12:14Z

I focused on transferring the logic, but I’d be happy to include the multi-select functionality as a follow-up.

Ok, we'll just want to try to get that out before the next release to avoid breaking behavior changes. But so long as that fits into your schedule, I'm fine getting this in as it is now. Nice work!

jdaviz/utils.py

bmorris3

This looks great @haticekaratay. Let's hold off on merging this PR, and implement multiselection before merge.

bmorris3

This is ✨awesome.

Question for @kecnry et al.: every time you select/deselect a footprint preview, the astroquery loader sends another query for products. These queries aren't particularly fast, and it's quite frustrating to wait for the query results in between each click.

Can we stop auto-querying on changes in selection, and start using a Query Products button instead, or similar?

kecnry · 2026-02-03T14:42:51Z

Can we just debounce/throttle the calls in a separate thread so they don't block additional clicks instead?

bmorris3 · 2026-02-03T14:57:42Z

Can we just debounce/throttle the calls in a separate thread so they don't block additional clicks instead?

I think that'll look like intermittent and unexpected periods of frozen app for the user. MM and especially the table widget are too slow to do this in the same kernel thread.

kecnry · 2026-02-03T15:12:46Z

if its not blocking then it should only show as the progressbar in the loader (we can also gray out the table and everything below it during an update, if necessary). I just want to avoid adding more steps to click, if possible, especially since those would then need to be done when using the API as well.

bmorris3 · 2026-02-03T15:21:45Z

It is blocking:

Screen.Recording.2026-02-03.at.10.19.33.mov

kecnry · 2026-02-03T15:29:27Z

Yes, its currently blocking, but we could/should make it not blocking

bmorris3

Notes for future work that does not need to be addressed in this PR:

the object loader UI button "enable footprint selection tools" (toggled by custom_toolbar_enabled) has no public API equivalent. Let's make one.
should "enable footprint selection tools" be default True? (we can wait until we've got a more feature complete workflow to do this)
in the screengrab I posted above, it seems like the products aren't shown until a second footprint selection is made. seems like a bug?
the ipyvuetify table widget is very slow to load long tables. Are there faster alternatives that don't require multithreading?
I'd advocate for manual triggers for data product queries via API/UI. it's inefficient to make a new query on every footprint click.
the ipyvuetify table row update is blocking but you wouldn't know unless you were looking at the footer. this needs a progress bar if we keep automatic data product list queries.
in the current implementation, we allow the user to load the observation table from API, but we automatically download product lists on selection events. We should expose constraints on the data product queries, like "_cal files" or "L2", etc. That limits the query results and the response time.
the current footprint preview click behavior always adds the footprints to the existing selection. this makes deselection tricky. I'd advocate for having, e.g., shift+click mean "add to selected footprints" and the default click mean "select only the footprints that meet the matching criteria for this tool, and deselect other selections"
the implementation in this PR applies to the object loader. the footprint preview/select features should also be added to the astroquery loader.

kecnry · 2026-02-03T15:56:50Z

Great, thanks @bmorris3! Please make sure that anything that won't be done here gets a follow-up ticket for whatever team is responsible for taking it on.

the object loader UI button "enable footprint selection tools" (toggled by custom_toolbar_enabled) has no public API equivalent. Let's make one.

agreed - we will want to do this in a general way so I think we postponed it when first building the infrastructure to see where else we'd use it. But between this and #3994, I think its time.

should "enable footprint selection tools" be default True? (we can wait until we've got a more feature complete workflow to do this)

I would probably argue against this unless we can find some clean trigger to do it and safety mechanism to not overwrite another open toolbar from another plugin, etc. We definitely don't want it to be True at init.

in the screengrab I posted above, it seems like the products aren't shown until a second footprint selection is made. seems like a bug?

this might be worth checking if it exists before this PR or not, and if it was somehow introduced just fix it here

in the current implementation, we allow the user to load the observation table from API, but we automatically download product lists on selection events. We should expose constraints on the data product queries, like "_cal files" or "L2", etc. That limits the query results and the response time.

I believe there is already a ticket for this (@camipacifici suggested the same)

the current footprint preview click behavior always adds the footprints to the existing selection. this makes deselection tricky. I'd advocate for having, e.g., shift+click mean "add to selected footprints" and the default click mean "select only the footprints that meet the matching criteria for this tool, and deselect other selections"

we now no longer have a concern about multiple tools (but let's not go crazy). I agree we need a way that is flexible and not confusing and there are lots of different combinations of how a user might want to use this. #3994 also will introduce the ability to add generic widgets in the custom toolbar, so you could even have simple "settings" for how a tool should act (a toggle for whether to use multi-select, etc).

the implementation in this PR applies to the object loader. the footprint preview/select features should also be added to the astroquery loader.

the code looks like its in the base class already, so I'm surprised that wouldn't work, but we definitely should make sure it does.

bmorris3

Thanks @haticekaratay!

The only potentially actionable comment in the review is the first one. We're good to merge when that's answered.

jdaviz/core/loaders/resolvers/resolver.py

bmorris3 · 2026-02-03T15:49:36Z

jdaviz/core/loaders/resolvers/resolver.py

+            # Toggle all found footprints as a group
+            # If ALL are selected, deselect ALL; otherwise select ALL
+            selected_indices_set = set(selected_indices)
+            if selected_indices_set.issubset(currently_selected):
+                # All found footprints are already selected - deselect them all
+                currently_selected -= selected_indices_set
            else:
-                currently_selected.add(selected_idx)
+                # At least one is not selected - select them all
+                currently_selected |= selected_indices_set


This is the block we'll need to update to support 'click to deselect' in a near-future PR.

bmorris3 · 2026-02-03T15:53:14Z

jdaviz/core/loaders/resolvers/test_resolver.py

Just want to say that these tests are so clear, thank you.

bmorris3 · 2026-02-03T15:56:30Z

pyproject.toml

    "s3fs>=2024.10.0",
    "joblib>=1.3.0",
    "ipyvuedraggable>=1.1.0",
+    "spherical-geometry",


Note: this dependency is currently needed to do proper contains and intersects operations for points and polygons on a sphere. Sedona has an implementation of spherical region operations in a PR to astropy regions (astropy/regions#618), which could make this dependency unnecessary at some point in the future, though we will have to test if the Python implementation in regions is too slow for our use compared to the C implementation in spherical-geometry.

For most supported workflows within jdaviz, the viewer FOV is expected to be <<1 deg. At that scale, one could argue that the small angle approximation could be assumed valid and we could use cartesian polygon overlap instead of spherical. We haven't made that assumption because it breaks down at the poles of any coordinate frame.

haticekaratay · 2026-02-03T16:35:23Z

It is blocking:

Screen.Recording.2026-02-03.at.10.19.33.mov

I can see the products with a single click, but it is slow.

Screen.Recording.2026-02-03.at.11.28.50.AM.mov

haticekaratay added this to the 4.5.1 milestone Dec 25, 2025

haticekaratay modified the milestones: 4.5.1, 4.6 Jan 16, 2026

haticekaratay force-pushed the loader-skewer-selection branch from ac8a8d4 to e7e8cf1 Compare January 16, 2026 15:54

haticekaratay marked this pull request as ready for review January 16, 2026 17:11

haticekaratay requested review from MatthewPortman, bmorris3, cshanahan1, gibsongreen, javerbukh, kecnry and rosteen as code owners January 16, 2026 17:11

kecnry reviewed Jan 21, 2026

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haticekaratay force-pushed the loader-skewer-selection branch from f4d814c to 38b8dc0 Compare January 22, 2026 14:57

kecnry approved these changes Jan 22, 2026

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kecnry added the Ready for final review label Jan 22, 2026

bmorris3 reviewed Jan 28, 2026

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bmorris3 mentioned this pull request Feb 2, 2026

Bugfixes for astroquery loader #4002

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haticekaratay force-pushed the loader-skewer-selection branch from 22e7f8f to 68dc390 Compare February 3, 2026 20:16

haticekaratay added 16 commits February 3, 2026 22:00

Add skewer selection icon

8b5c61c

Add spherical geometry dependency

439d2f3

Select skewer vs nearest dynamically

f48b268

Add skewer select tool

9979d93

Add helper for skewer logic

66136b4

Clean up

a58ca73

Add skewer selection logic

e802070

Add tests

a37ddd7

Add a changelog

361e172

Fix codestyle

2169333

Update tooltip description

a3bf13b

Flatten tool navigation

fabae9f

Change the icon

cf34673

Address review comments

09e1f4c

Select all overlapping footprints

b54dddf

Simplify footprint selection handler

aa03ad7

haticekaratay force-pushed the loader-skewer-selection branch from 68dc390 to aa03ad7 Compare February 4, 2026 03:01

kecnry merged commit 5a2e8c9 into spacetelescope:main Feb 5, 2026
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