Metanode attribute: sum of attribute for nodes

[ChrisWellington]

This ultimately has to do with the size of metanodes, but I'm not suggesting a new way to set their size directly (which I think is what is being suggested on the feature request wiki).

It is quite handy that metanodes can be sized based on the total number of nodes they enclose. Sometimes, though, each node has an inherent size (in my case, the volume of associated sequence data). When I combine five nodes, I would like the metanode not to have size five, but size the sum of the volumes of the source nodes.

In actual use, however, directly setting size could be problematic. Adjusting spline, for instance, would be difficult (at least, I don't know how to do it with the automatically set size). The more flexible approach would be to allow metanodes to inherit attributes from their component nodes. If the attribute were a number, the metanode could take the sum value (maybe others would also find average, min, max, etc useful, too). This would allow users to set the size of the node (or color, or other attributes) for the metanode. For me, keeping the spline setting available is key here, as I find that critical when I am trying to use size to visualize huge differences.

So...Is this already available, and have I missed it? Are there any clever ways to work around it (my current idea: do clustering in Gephi, make metanodes, export node table with metanodes, do magic in Python/Perl/Excel/something, and reload to Gephi)? If I'm not missing something that already exists, I think this would be a great candidate for a future release.