Hierarchical Layout with Tabular Groups

This demo shows how to configure the tabular groups feature of the HierarchicalLayout class.

Children of a tabular group are placed in a compact tabular fashion, on the same hierarchical layer next to each other. A left-to-right layout orientation like in this demo results in child nodes being placed in a column-like way, one above the other.

Tabular groups have the benefit that they produce maximally compact group layouts. While for normal group nodes, other criteria like reducing edge bends are prioritized, this is not the case for tabular groups. A possible application is, for example, entity–relationship diagrams showing relationships between entities of a database or other system.

In this demo, all groups are unconditionally treated as tabular groups. Nested tabular groups are supported, see the UML sample diagram. In fact, any group which is a child of a tabular group automatically becomes a tabular one, too.

Things to try

• Browse the provided sample graphs.
• Enable and disable the tabular groups feature using the toolbar button and observe the difference to the default hierarchical arrangement.
• See the effect of the sorting and child distance options. Note that if sorting by label text is enabled, the result may contain more edge crossings, because the order cannot be freely optimized.