.. _workflow-visualization:

Workflow Visualization
**********************

BEE includes a simple command for viewing BEE workflows. By using the ``beeflow
dag $ID`` command, you can view the directed acyclic graph (DAG) of any submitted
workflow.

Creating DAGs
=============

The dag command can be run at any point of the workflow, and can
be run multiple times. To see the DAG of a workflow before it runs, submit
the workflow with the ``--no-start`` flag and then use the dag command. The
DAGs are exported in PNG format to ~/.beeflow/dags. They follow the naming
convention ``$ID.png``

Example DAG
===========

The DAG below was created by running the dag command while the cat-grep-tar
example workflow was running.

.. image:: images/941cd5.png

The orange bubbles are inputs, the blue bubbles are task states, the red
bubbles are tasks, and the green bubbles are outputs. The graph is in a
hierarchical format, meaning that tasks that are higher up in the graph
run before the ones below them.