building a log console in visualization

[diegondres]

Hi everyone, I am trying to build a model that reports the actions being taken, for that I would like to build a console log but I am not sure how to do it. Any advice I would appreciate

[dmasad]

If you want to log text in the visualization, the TextElement visualization element might be what you're looking for:
https://github.com/projectmesa/mesa/blob/main/mesa/visualization/modules/TextVisualization.py

You can also maintain a log via the table API of DataCollector, or else write entries yourself in the model.

Below is a minimal working example that brings those all together:

from mesa import Agent, Model
from mesa.time import RandomActivation
from mesa.datacollection import DataCollector

from mesa.visualization.modules import TextElement
from mesa.visualization.ModularVisualization import ModularServer

# Set up model
# =============================================================
class ActionLoggingAgent(Agent):
    possible_actions = ["A", "B", "C"]
    def __init__(self, name, model):
        super().__init__(name, model)
    
    def step(self):
        action = self.model.random.choice(self.possible_actions)
        self.model.log(self.unique_id, action)
        

class ActionLoggingModel(Model):
    def __init__(self):
        self.running = True
        self.schedule = RandomActivation(self)
        self.action_log = []
        self.datacollector = DataCollector(tables=
                                           {"ActionLog": 
                                               ["step", "agent", "action"]})
        self.n_agents = 10
        for i in range(self.n_agents):
            agent = ActionLoggingAgent(i, self)
            self.schedule.add(agent)
    
    def step(self):
        self.schedule.step()
    
    def log(self, agent, action):
        ''' Add an action to the log
        '''
        self.action_log.append((self.schedule.steps, agent, action))
        
        # Add to the datacollector
        self.datacollector.add_table_row("ActionLog", 
                                         {"step": self.schedule.steps,
                                          "agent": agent,
                                          "action": action
                                          })
        

# Set up visualization
# =============================================================
class LogElement(TextElement):
    def __init__(self):
        pass
    
    def render(self, model):
        # To write the output of the action_log list:
        return "<BR>".join(f"{step}: {agent} took action {action}"
                           for step, agent, action in model.action_log)
        
        # To render the datacollector table as an HTML table:
        #return model.datacollector.get_table_dataframe("ActionLog").to_html()

if __name__ == "__main__":
    log_element = LogElement()
    server = ModularServer(ActionLoggingModel, [log_element], "Log example")
    server.launch()

[diegondres]

thanks! it helped me a lot