Group nodes that share a property

Question

Hi,

Is this possible to group/ungroup nodes based on their properties?

For example, let's imagine that my nodes are real-world objects. Each node have two properties : "object type" and "colour". Sometimes, I need to see my nodes grouped by colour, and sometimes I need to see my nodes grouped by their types.

I haven't found how to do that with yEd. So I use two graphs. It's double work when I need to update the graphs. :-(

So, I believe that yEd should be able to group nodes automatically based on the node properties. If this is feasible, please let me know how. If not, it would be very useful to be able to do that.

Thanks,

Greg

Answer 1

Although this is a quite natural way of defining groups, it's not yet possible in yEd. I thought there is already a feature request for this idea but I couldn't find any, so I changed your question into one.

Comments

Hi! It would make sense to have this option in the "Grouping" tab of the layout dialogs. It could be an option like :

[ ] create groups according to node properties :
    (list of all properties) <-> (sortable list of selected properties)

In my example, I would only have to change the right list from :
- colour
- object type
to
- object type
- colour

What to do with groups which have been defined manually/graphically? Maybe they could be redefined as "non editable" node properties. So these "static groups" would appear in the lists I described above, and the user would be able to tell the layout algorithm what to do with them : either sort "inside" them, or rework everything.