Plainion.GraphViz

Tamer of complex graphs and even galaxies

View project on GitHub

Basics

Each graph consists of nodes and edges. Optionally nodes an be grouped into (clusters)[Clusters].

The interaction with the graph is mostly mouse driven.

  • Use LMB-Drag to pan the graph
  • Use the mouse wheel or cursor up/down keys to zoom in and out at the point in the graph where the mouse pointer is pointing to
  • Use RMB-Drag to draw a rectangle you want to zoom in

Use RMB-Click on an edge to jump to source or target node of that edge.

Use the RMB-Click on the canvas and the “Home” context menu to reset the zoom to the initial value.

You can use the search box find nodes in a complex graph. It has a preview popup to support the search. You have to select the node you are interested in with ENTER to trigger the search.

Note: unfortionately the search is sometimes not exactly locating the found node in the center of the canvas, so you may have to slowly zoom out and check a bit left and right. This will be improved in future version.

Selection

You can you Ctrl-LMB-Click to select one or multple nodes and edges. This may help to keep the overview in a huge graph while manually navigating with zoom and pan.

Use RMB-Click on the canvas and the “Deselect all” context menu to remove all selection from the graph.

Graph Layouts

Plainion.Graphviz supports various graph layout algorithms.

Tree

Most of the time you probably want to layout your graph in a kind of tree or hierachical structure because this gives usually the best overview about node dependencies.

Note: If the graph is too complex (too many edges) this layout algorithm may fail. You may even see a “Windows Error Reporint (WER)” dialog popping up. You can click it away - a fallback algorithm will be selected automatically.

Flow

This algorithm is very similar to the “Tree” algorithm except that arrows are flowing from left to right.

Note: same limitation as with “Tree” algorithm

Galaxies

This algorithm organizes dependencies in a circular way. It is fast and can handle even extremely huge graphs.

This algorithm does not support clusters very well.

Hands-on