[Netron-graphlib] User defined connections

[Illumineo <Net...@ho...>]

 
 Martin,

It's only now that I see your mail of the 26th, sorry for this late reply.
My mother is dying of cancer and it absorbs me now and then.

The user-defined-connections (UDC): the only thing I have in my hands not is
the stuff you can find in v1b and which you have been modelling since then
(I guess). So, no there is not anything ready. I have to ask though how you
see these UDC's because in v2 there are two types of connections: standard
and rectangular, both with all the other connection attributes (arrow,
colors...). Is this a UDC? I guess you see a UDC as an inherited connections
class but in this case I understand that this is part of a Visio-like idea,
which I'm not frantic about as you know. This is 'cause it does not support
any data flow, a freely moving UDC does not enforce connector-based
connections. The easiest way to implement a freely moving UDC is by using
the Shape class which would give a thing that 'looks' like a connection but
is really just a shape and, hence, not forced to belong to any connectors.

For the other two items: I think I can implement shape-dependent
context-menus is a snap, as well as the delegates for user-defined actions
on the Entity level.

I like the 'family' idea of layout algorithms. It is something I already
tried if you look at older downloads (circular algorithm, and an algorithm I
found in DrDobb's). Unfortunately they gave hyperbolic results. The easy way
is to look at the Java libraries out there, many many good graph libs in
Java. In that respect, we still have to go catch a lot of stuff Java
developers already did.

Best regards, Francois