Graph node pairs with distance set between them

Question

I have a spreadsheet of three columns: A, B, C. Nodes A and B are places. C is the distance between the places - the length that I would like the edges to be between the two nodes.

I would like to create a graph (probably an organic graph in yEd terms) that shows all the nodes and all the edges between them and places the nodes at a distance from each other equal to the value of C for that pair.

An initial implementation might have some reasonable limits:

- no more than 100 nodes

- distances limited to whole numbers, with some upper limit, say 50

There is a special case when distance is zero. This could be addressed by forcing the user to scale the data in a range from 1 to 50 (i.e. by adding 1 to every value, so that there no longer are zero distances) or by allowing 0 to 50 and then devising some way of showing nodes that overlap

Answer 1

Maybe I should have mentioned this in my answer to your original question, but this requirement is much too case specific to be a good addition to a general purpose editor such as yEd.

Moreover, in the general case it is not possible to arrange a graph according to your requirement (suppose you have nodes a,b,c with dist(a,b)=100 and dist(a,c)=dist(b,c)=1). The fact that the distances should be whole numbers complicates the problem even further.

That said, should you already know an algorithm that arranges graphs according to your requirement (assuming a set of distances for which a solution exists), you could implement a custom application with your algorithm using one of the yFiles programming libraries. Please visit the yWorks website for further information on yFiles.