[Netron-graphlib] Black-box shapes

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

For JR.

On a few occasions people have asked something like 'group shapes', a kind
of box/unbox feature. I understand the need for this very well; if you have
a lot of shapes things start to become ugly and difficult to overview.
Besides this, moving related shapes becomes more easy in this way. In
certain applications this is called a 'Xshape' and can be saved separately
(I think of Cinema4D here). So...yes, I've thought about it but it never got
into anything concrete. I think it's not the kinda thing you can do before
the rest of the code is stable...which is the case now (tell me if it's
not!). Saying this, it's not a simple thing to implement. How to handle the
connections and the connector? I can see some straightforward code for
grouping shapes but I cannot immedaitely see how to handle the links and
connectors.

If anybody has some code or ideas, gimme some feedback.

For Martin.

How are things going with GraphML? I haven't had time this weekend to do
enything Netron-like but I woke up at 5AM this morning to dive into it
again. Don't ask me how I feel now ;-)

All the best, I.






____________________________
Hi,
The new v.2 is working great, thanks for all the hard work.  

I'm interested in creating a shape that encapsulates a set of other shapes
within it.  Once some functionallity is determined and tested for a set of
shapes I want those shapes to be able to be hidden from the user's view in
the graph control.  This way a single so called "Blackbox Shape" that hides
the internals from the user will be displayed in their place.

My initial plan is to define a shape with its own GraphAbstract in which I
copy the set of shapes into and remove them from the GraphControl's extract
or simply load them from a saved file into the Blackbox shape. With some
user input the Blackbox's Abstract would be displayed either in another
form's GraphControl or something...not quite sure until I try it.

I was wondering if you had experienced any issues with this or have tried
something simialiar to this during your development of the NetronGraphLib
and the sample apps?

Thanks,
-JR