Render publish summary hierarchy and timeline

[sebastienros]

Description

Organizes the aspire do publish step summary hierarchically instead of sorting steps by duration alone.

It also adds a compact Unicode timeline ruler and per-step bars so the summary shows when each step starts and finishes while keeping the same number of step lines.

To support the display, the pipeline now includes display-parent and level metadata for publish steps, and the CLI uses that metadata when rendering the summary.

Examples:

Checklist

• Is this feature complete?
  • Yes. Ready to ship.
  • No. Follow-up changes expected.
• Are you including unit tests for the changes and scenario tests if relevant?
  • Yes
  • No
• Did you add public API?
  • Yes
    • If yes, did you have an API Review for it?
      • Yes
      • No
    • Did you add <remarks /> and <code /> elements on your triple slash comments?
      • Yes
      • No
  • No
• Does the change make any security assumptions or guarantees?
  • Yes
    • If yes, have you done a threat model and had a security review?
      • Yes
      • No
  • No
• Does the change require an update in our Aspire docs?
  • Yes
    • Link to aspire.dev issue:
      • New issue
  • No

[github-actions]

🚀 Dogfood this PR with:

⚠️ WARNING: Do not do this without first carefully reviewing the code of this PR to satisfy yourself it is safe.

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/microsoft/aspire/main/eng/scripts/get-aspire-cli-pr.sh | bash -s -- 15530

Or

• Run remotely in PowerShell:

iex "& { $(irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/microsoft/aspire/main/eng/scripts/get-aspire-cli-pr.ps1) } 15530"

[Copilot]

Pull request overview

This PR enhances aspire do publish step summaries by rendering steps in a hierarchical (parent/child) order and adding a compact timeline ruler + per-step bars to visualize when each step starts/finishes. It does so by emitting hierarchy metadata from the hosting pipeline and consuming it in the CLI summary renderer.

Changes:

• Add ParentStepId / HierarchyLevel metadata to publishing step activities and propagate it from pipeline execution.
• Update CLI summary rendering to order steps hierarchically and display a timeline scale with per-step bars.
• Add/extend unit tests for hierarchy metadata emission and timeline/tree rendering.

Reviewed changes

Copilot reviewed 8 out of 8 changed files in this pull request and generated 2 comments.

Show a summary per file

File	Description
tests/Aspire.Hosting.Tests/Publishing/PipelineActivityReporterTests.cs	Adds coverage ensuring hierarchy metadata is emitted on step create/complete activities.
tests/Aspire.Cli.Tests/Utils/ConsoleActivityLoggerTests.cs	Adds assertions for hierarchical ordering and timeline ruler/bar output in summaries.
src/Aspire.Hosting/Pipelines/ReportingStep.cs	Stores parent step id + hierarchy level on the reporting step instance.
src/Aspire.Hosting/Pipelines/PipelineActivityReporter.cs	Emits hierarchy metadata in step activities via a shared activity-data builder.
src/Aspire.Hosting/Pipelines/DistributedApplicationPipeline.cs	Computes display hierarchy from DAG dependencies and supplies parent/level metadata when creating reporting steps.
src/Aspire.Hosting/Backchannel/BackchannelDataTypes.cs	Extends backchannel activity payload with ParentStepId and HierarchyLevel.
src/Aspire.Cli/Utils/ConsoleActivityLogger.cs	Implements hierarchical ordering + timeline ruler/bars in the “Steps Summary” output.
src/Aspire.Cli/Commands/PipelineCommandBase.cs	Captures hierarchy metadata from activities and populates duration records with offsets for timeline rendering.

[adamint]

I like it, works well with multiple hierarchy levels too

[JamesNK]

Nice.

I noticed the ticks at the top of the summary aren't consistently placed:

[JamesNK]

What happens with long step names when there isn't enough room:

[JamesNK]

How deeply can things be nested? If something is nested 10 levels deep, what is displayed? It seems like text would be completely out of view because of indenting.

[JamesNK]

In the dashboard I found it useful to have a stress project that would generate extreme results that I could use to test the UI. I think you need something like that to test this timeline.

I added an internal aspire render command for testing rendering various things. I think you could add an option to render this timeline with static data for various scenarios: deeply nested steps, very long text, text containing markup, mixing in steps without parents, very long and very short durations, etc.

Use your imagination and try hard to break the UI with extreme situations. That's the only way to create something that consistently works for everyone.

[davidfowl]

I was going to suggest also running it in a github actions pipeline to see how it renders.

[JamesNK]

I added an internal aspire render command for testing rendering various things. I think you could add an option to render this timeline with static data for various scenarios: deeply nested steps, very long text, text containing markup, mixing in steps without parents, very long and very short durations, etc.

Use your imagination and try hard to break the UI with extreme situations. That's the only way to create something that consistently works for everyone.

I'd really like this so it would be easy for me to see output and then easily modify the static result that's passed to the render method to see if I can break it.

[sebastienros]

@JamesNK I'll take the time then, I am fine taking this PR slow until it's better, I need to switch focus on more important things.