Tree Drawing in .NET (C#): tree, draw

by: malharonePosted on 2004-01-07 at 09:18:56ID: 10063454

Is this for display purpose only or for parsing and then computing ?
Look into INORDER trees/graph structures.

by: JazzlePosted on 2004-01-07 at 09:28:33ID: 10063540

it's for display purposes only, and just one tree at a time.

by: malharonePosted on 2004-01-07 at 09:32:48ID: 10063572

first given any string .. you'd need to set your order of operation -- eg. operator predescence (i donno if that's the correct spelling)

So given
1+2*3+4/6

you'd have

+ 1
* 2
3
/ 4
6

is that right?

by: JazzlePosted on 2004-01-07 at 09:41:10ID: 10063646

in fact it's easier that than because the string would be in prefix notation:
e.g. +xy for x+y and +*xyz for (x*y)+z

so, +*xyz would look like:

+
/ \
* z
/ \
x y

The real question is, how do I get the system to draw this?

by: malharonePosted on 2004-01-07 at 09:43:31ID: 10063663

well .. you can't really draw the real trees using the built in controls. you can create a control to owner draw this type of tree. but then you'd have to re-implement the "+" & "-" -- expand and collapse capabilities in addition to formatting .. etc.

so better stick to the Win Explorer format -- using Tree View.

by: JazzlePosted on 2004-01-07 at 09:54:32ID: 10063782

not really what i was after. and i don't need to expand or collapse branches.

i was hoping there would be a simple way to draw lines and single chars given an input string...
if i get desperate, i might have to do it with ascii!

by: malharonePosted on 2004-01-07 at 09:55:36ID: 10063796

then you're better off with ASCII ... but even with ASCII you dont have easy way of determining spacing between the elements.

by: JazzlePosted on 2004-01-07 at 09:59:18ID: 10063843

that's one of the biggies.

i hope someone knows of some software that could do it... (a graphical control of some sort.)

by: malharonePosted on 2004-01-07 at 10:03:21ID: 10063883

checkout: http://www.seanet.com/users/arsen/avltree.html
very neat .. and should give you idea for drawing trees. in .net to draw graphics ... use this
System.Drawing.Graphics g=this.CreateGraphics();
g.DrawLine(new System.Drawing.Pen(Color.Red),1,1,100,100);
g.<MANY DRAWING FUNCTIONS ... e.g. drawarc, drawrectangle, drawcircle, et.c..>

by: JazzlePosted on 2004-01-07 at 10:14:39ID: 10063998

have had a look at the page, and the applet - although i agree it is very neat, i need more of a solution in C# or a way to create a solution in MS VS2002/3.

by: farsightPosted on 2004-01-07 at 11:39:20ID: 10064810

There's a product that I had in mind (vaguely) because I remembered some graph layouts that impressed me. I had to do some searching to find it.

I don't know how much work this would take to use for your application, but it would be sure to create a visually appealing result. It does do automatic layout, though I don't know how closely that matches your application. See the diagrams and explanation near the top of the second link.

Tom Sawyer products
http://www.tomsawyer.com/products.html
...
Graph Layout Toolkit (C++) -- shows good diagrams of their technology
http://www.tomsawyer.com/glt/index.html
...
The Graph Editor Toolkit for the Microsoft Development Community (.NET)
http://www.tomsawyer.com/get/get-windows.html

Cool, huh?

--- --- ---
Other tools I found during my search. These are not very on-target, but might still be useful.

MetaDraw
http://www.bennet-tec.com/btproducts/metadraw/metadraw.htm

AddFlow
http://www.lassalle.com/afnet.htm

RFFlow
http://www.rff.com/

Process Chart
http://www.processchart.com/

FlowChartX
http://mindfusion.org/download.html
http://mindfusion.org/gallery6.html

by: JazzlePosted on 2004-01-07 at 11:52:52ID: 10064918

from a quick look at these, some may prove useful. i will get back to you all when i've had a better look at them.
thanks, and don't hesitate to suggest others. (the software must draw the tree for me, with very simple text input.)

by: farsightPosted on 2004-01-07 at 12:39:40ID: 10065292

(By the way, don't waste a lot of time on those "not on-target" links. If they don't look right, just move on.)

Here's a couple more on-target that look very promising, though.

daVinci Presenter
http://www.b-novative.com/developer/dv30_doc/conc_lay.html
http://www.b-novative.com/developer/dv30_doc/term.html
(You could probably do simple text-processing to convert your input strings to their format.)
http://www.b-novative.com/developer/dv30_doc/term_exam.html
Brochure (with diagrams)
http://download.b-novative.com/daVinci_Presenter_Handout_Englisch.pdf

Graphlet, Graphscript
http://www.infosun.fmi.uni-passau.de/Graphlet/index.html

---
Great list of graph drawing tools (Some I've found, some new.)
http://i11www.informatik.uni-karlsruhe.de/algo/cosin/tools.html

---
You might find good info at http://graphdrawing.org
book list:
http://graphdrawing.org/literature/content.html

---
Another aside -- this one you'll probably find interesting.
For math notation, not graphs.

MathML .NET Control 1.0
http://www.dnzone.net/ShowDetail.asp?NewsId=185

---

Hmmmm ... getting a bit carried away here!

by: farsightPosted on 2004-01-07 at 12:42:28ID: 10065318

Ok, one more ...

Graphviz -- open source graph drawing software
http://www.research.att.com/~north/graphviz/

There seems to be a lot more available in Java, Unix, etc. rather than .NET.

by: JazzlePosted on 2004-01-07 at 14:28:15ID: 10066401

> There seems to be a lot more available in Java, Unix, etc. rather than .NET.
I do wish I could do it in Java, but have to use C++/C# for the speed. (Genetic Programming is the main task for my system)

by: JazzlePosted on 2004-01-07 at 14:32:40ID: 10066449

I will be back in a couple of days when I expect to dish out the points!

by: JazzlePosted on 2004-01-22 at 10:09:32ID: 10175998

anything further anyone?

by: farsightPosted on 2004-01-24 at 06:38:23ID: 10190975

Jazzle,
This is the last I'll have for this question, but feel free to contact me (via info in my profile). I'm a bit interested in your project. It would be cool if you could leave an update/status here sometime in the future -- particularly about the graphics/layout solution you finally implement, but also about the project in general.

I'm going to try using Netron (see below) for a project I'm just beginning. Looks promising. I just downloaded it, but haven't installed yet.

DRAWING
What have you determined about all the above posts for drawing solutions? Anything at all interesting?
I'm pretty sure you'll need to write something yourself for your particular application. You've got lots of choices for doing the graphics,m even just the System.Drawing namespace. Perhaps that would be the "simple way to draw lines and single chars given an input string" you mentioned way up top. If you do use System.Drawing you'll have to write-your-own layout code.

LAYOUT
If you need an algorithm to properly layout the tree, do a search on "layout algorithm" or "graph layout algorithm" or "tree layout algorithm". Or you could come up with your algorithm for this simple case: I guess every node would have 0, 1, or 2 children. You could start with a simple, naive implementation, with one child a bit to the left, and the other a bit to the right. That's result in overlap. Then you can tweak and tune the algorithm to avoid overlap. If you do the layout from the bottom upwards, each node should be able to look at the left-bound and right-bound of the left and right sub-trees, and determine how far left and right they need to be placed.

MORE DRAWING TOOLS

The Netron Project (includes some? layout, free, beta, see license)
http://sourceforge.net/projects/netron/

GoDiagram for Microsoft .NET ($$)
http://www.nwoods.com/GO/dotnet.htm
http://www.godotnetweb.com/samples/ (for the ASP.NET version)
The TreeApp and AutoLayout Demo samples may be close to what you need.

by: JazzlePosted on 2004-01-25 at 05:22:35ID: 10195007

thanks to farsight, and to malharone.
points split as appropriate.

by: JazzlePosted on 2005-03-29 at 02:33:23ID: 13651161

this is long overdue, but I thought I shold say what I did in the end.
I used that last suggestion, Northwoods, with a free educational license.

My diss is at http://www.jazzle.co.uk/GPGUI.pdf (1.74MB PDF )and contains some more info if you're interested.

by: farsightPosted on 2005-03-29 at 09:24:23ID: 13654312

Thanks for the feedback.

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Tree Drawing in .NET (C#)

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