Re: [Netron-graphlib] Black-box shapes

[Martin C. <mar...@ei...>]

Hmmm, interesting. I have to do something similar. I needed to be able 
to collapse all child nodes into one shape, and then expand them again 
if asked. This may be done at multiple levels in the diagram. Besides 
the connectors and connections issues raised by Francois, there is also 
the issue of layout. When you box a group of shapes, you end up with one 
shape in place of N shapes and lots of free space.
Joe User then decides to add new shapes in the newly created 'free 
space'. Afterwards he decides to unbox the previous group of shapes, 
where do they go? Do we put them back in their original unboxed positions?

Regards,

Martin

Illumineo wrote:
> 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
> 
> 
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