Description
GEF (Graph Editing Framework) is a library of Java classes for editing diagrams and graphs. It is used by ArgoUML for UML diagrams. This project is an implementation of a graph layout algorithm to automatically position the nodes and link bends of a graph in a way that is particularly suited to UML class diagrams.
The algorithm is a combination of the well-known Sugiyama algorithm with some orthogonal drawing techniques. A UML class diagram has two main types of links - the inheritance relationships and the associations. The inheritance relationships form a hierarchical structure. In computing a layout I will use the Sugiyama algorithm to draw the classes involved in the inheritance relationships. The algorithm has four steps; it temporarily removes any directed cycles by reversing a small number of links, places the nodes on horizontal levels so that all links are directed similarly, permutes the nodes on each level to minimise the number of link crossings, and balances the layout. Then it adds in the remaining classes and the association links while preserving the basic structure. UML class diagrams have additional requirements that are not handled by generic graph layout algorithms, for example, the nodes do not have fixed size and the association links are labelled in a very particular manner.
Details of the algorithms we use can be found
here.
