Vertical node alignment across Swimlanes

Question

Hi,

I am starting using Yed to show project progress graphically.

I am trying to place several swimlanes stacked vertically, each swimlane representing a project. Columns represents the timer (months) while rows represents various item categories.

When I perform a hierarchic swimlane layout left to right, I get something like this:

My problem is that I would like to represent long tasks with a larger node width, but when I do so, the layout algorithm tries to center align nodes between swimlanes (long task in Project A gets center aligned with first short task node in Project B).

Is there a way to get the algorithm removing this vertical alignment between separate swimlanes? At the same time, I would like to keep the swimlanes columns aligned in such a way each month has the same width in each swimlane. Is that possible, or any other method you would recommend for the task I want to accomplish?

Thanks,

Franck

Answer 1

You can have "Long task" from "Project A" and the first "Short task" from "Project B" aligned at their left border if you set option "Alignment within Layer" to value "Top Border of Nodes". However, it is not possible to get the second "Short task" in "Project B" to overlap with the "Long task" from "Project A".

The reason for this is the basic concept of the algorithm: it organizes nodes in (non-overlapping) layers.
In your example, "Long task" from "Project A" and the left-most "Short task" from "Project B" are in the first layer, the center "Short task" nodes from each project are in the second layer, and the right-most "Short task" from "Project B" is in the third layer.