Three Questions: Layout, Data Formats, and Navigation

Question

I've just installed and played around with yEd. It looks good, and is easy in a fair number of respects. There seem to be some things that are more fiddly than necessary, though, and other things that don't happen at all.

First, when I import an existing .graphml file generated by a different application, the original data formatting is overlooked. So things like node size, colour, and label are not applied to the layout. I hope there's a conversion routine, or an import function that allows me to map an old field onto a new one. Yes? No?

Second, the standard layouts (Hierachical, Circular, Organic, etc) require at least two clicks to execute. But then there are even more clicks required to do things like remove overlaps. When I'm editing a graph, and want to update the layout, I have to run through several steps just to re-establish the existing pattern. This extended series of steps would be worth putting in a macro and running as a sort of extended layout. I'm hoping there's a way of recording such macros, or setting an extended layout profile that can be executed with a hotkey. Or similar?

Third, I would like a view that starts with a selected node, and shows only the successor nodes. Or similar. If there's a way to weight each node by degrees of separation, and render only those nodes within a specified degree, that would make things a lot more effective for me. Does anything of the sort exist already?

Answer 1

1. The GraphML specification does not specify how size, color, and labels have to be stored in GraphML. Thus everyone using GraphML is free to come up with their own way to store such information. Unfortunately, this means that yEd would have to know which application was used for generating your GraphML file and how that application stores size, color, labels, etc.
In short, only structural information can be imported from "foreign" GraphML files.

If you know how to use XSLT, you might be able to convert your GraphML files into "yEd GraphML files" - i.e. convert the additional information in your GraphML files into a format supported by yEd.

 

2. Unfortunately, yEd does not support macros or recoding user actions for repeating complex processes.

If you run the layout algorithms with the same options each time, you can reduce the required clicks for that step by turning off option "Show Modules Dialog" on tab "Modules" of "File" -> "Preferences".

 

3. yEd's main editor area always displays all nodes. However, yEd offers four context views, one of which displays only the successors of the currently selected nodes. The context view are by default located on the left between the overview and the structure view.