Why not listen if using a non-default dataset?

[xmo-odoo]

Trying venator for ingestion, I figured I'd use the :memory: dataset as I had no idea where venator was creating its default dataset and I wanted to clear it¹, surprisingly when doing that venator "stops working" as it doesn't bind anything. This is visible in the UI if one notices the "not listening" but it's quite confusing.

Why does venator not listen when using a custom dataset?

Also maybe it could dump the default dataset path to stderr when it uses that?

Footnotes

1. the "delete all" option doesn't seem to to anything on my system, but I'm not sure why yet ↩

[kmdreko]

The thinking was that if you were loading from a specific file then it assumes that a file was saved (using File > Save as) with a specific set of data to be inspected or compared later. The defaults further assume that you don't want to modify a dataset that was saved separately.

However, you bring up a good point that this default doesn't make sense for the special :memory: dataset since it would always have no data on startup. I could (and should) change that.

By the way, you can specify a -b/--bind parameter (when starting the app from the command line) to set a listening address even when loading a non-default dataset.

[xmo-odoo]

By the way, you can specify a -b/--bind parameter (when starting the app from the command line) to set a listening address even when loading a non-default dataset.

Yep, I found that and it works fine, but I figured I'd ask about this behaviour. The idea of using it to observe a previously saved trace does make sense, it just wasn't my use case so I really wasn't expecting this. Maybe there could be two different option even if they kinda do the same behind the scenes? One for observing an existing file and one for changing the location where venator stores the session data? I wanted the latter, and didn't think of the former at all.

[kmdreko]

I had no idea where venator was creating its default dataset

I need to put this in some docs somewhere, but it should be stored in:

• %appdata%/Venator/ on Windows
• ~/Library/Application Support/Venator/ on MacOS
• ~/.config/Venator/ on Linux

Also maybe it could dump the default dataset path to stderr when it uses that?

That's a decent idea

[kmdreko]

the "delete all" option doesn't seem to to anything on my system, but I'm not sure why yet

The deletion user experience is pretty poor at the moment. When you click the button it does some work to determine what is to be deleted - which may take some time with no indication what it is doing. It then pops up a confirmation dialog with some metrics. When clicking yes, it does the actual deletion - which may take even more time also with no indication what it is doing.

Its not 100% clear if you're just hitting a UI issue or if the actual deletion is somehow buggy, but it needs some work regardless.

[xmo-odoo]

Thanks, I'll try to keep track of what's happening / what I'm doing next time around, and try to report if things behave in an unexpected manner.