Re: Dia extensions

[Lars Clausen <lrclause cs uiuc edu>]

On Wed, 21 Aug 2002, Daniel Pérez Alcázar wrote:
> First of all, thak you for all of your comments.
>
> As I can see, vey nice people here in dia-list (funny people at least)
> :-)
>
> Your advice has been very useful and now I know where I must begin.
>
> About this last comment, I have something to say. The solution that
> Jason explains is not what I like. What I liked was something
> graphical.... something nice. There's not very much schedulling in
> what I liked. I want to generate diagrams of subjects which the user
> would give to the program (or dia or anything), and it simply would
> draw to the user the connections and other subjects which are
> requisite of the subjects which the user entered. The job is not very
> difficult. It's more important to have a nice diagram of the
> subjects.

You need to remember that Dia doesn't have any diagram layout builtin.  You
cannot simply say "Class A requires Class B" and expect Dia to place the
objects in reasonable positions.

If it's really all about the pretty diagram, I would actually suggest using
Dot (from the Graphviz package).  It could work like this:

The student enters a list of classes on a web page.
Dot renders a diagram of those classes and their prerequisites.
The resulting webpage displays the diagram together with ways to add and
  remove classes.

Diagram layout is no simple problem, and not a problem that Dia attempts to
solve. 

> Even  no DB backend is needed.

For this, I have but one question:  How many classes will this system handle?

-Lars

-- 
Lars Clausen (http://shasta.cs.uiuc.edu/~lrclause)| Hårdgrim of Numenor
"I do not agree with a word that you say, but I   |----------------------------
will defend to the death your right to say it."   | Where are we going, and
    --Evelyn Beatrice Hall paraphrasing Voltaire  | what's with the handbasket?