Re: A patch to support creating network diagrams using programs

[Aaron Trevena <aaron trevena gmail com>]

On 5/19/05, Lars Clausen <lars raeder dk> wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-05-16 at 08:25 -0400, Michael Tiemann wrote:
> > I'm writing some scripts to extract data from spreadsheets and build
> > network flow diagrams.  I assumed that if I created a line that
> > connected handle A to handle B that dia would figure out where to put
> > the line and display it.  It did not (instead defaulting to position 0,0
> > and bounding box 0,0,0,0).  Here's a patch so that locations and bb's
> > can be inferred by what they connect.
>
> A nice idea, but not quite that easy.  You implementation has a couple
> problems (assuming that all objects have handles, assuming that
> connectionpoint 0 is always connected on the objects we want to fix),
> but also a more serious problem:  When you do move_handle, you're not
> guaranteed that the connection will go to the connection point it was
> originally on, but rather on the connection point that is on top at that
> place.  Hopefully a generated diagram would not have many overlaps like
> that, though.

Those problems are minimal compared to the current situation. I had to
give up connecting shapes in Autodia because it was near impossible to
work out the positions of the connectors, so now it has a trimmed
sprout of lines from each shape that connect only when the shape they
connect to moves. This is far from satisfactory.

Umbrello manages this OK, I think. Yes I know Dia isn't umbrello but
there is little point having an XML file format if you can't create
that XML and have it JustWork(TM) :)

Cheers,

A