The control now supports the model / view architecture. Actually this wasn't a planned feature, but it came naturally from the division of the Flowchart.NET classes between the shared "MindFusion.Diagramming" and the Windows Forms specific "MindFusion.Diagramming.WinForms" assemblies. The document class is called Diagram, and the view class is called DiagramView. The printing, clipboard, inplace text editing and mouse cursor -related properties and methods have been moved to DiagramView.

For compatibility with old code, we might implement the current FlowChart class API in version 5 too by inheriting from DiagramView and exposing the Diagram properties through FlowChart wrapper properties. Please let us know if you'd like to see this.

g.

We are pondering another change in the Flowchart.NET API. Consider the following

* the ControlHost class will be implemented in an external assembly;
* version 5 will include a new node type – Container;
* we want to make it easier to implement custom node types;

So, we plan to ditch the type specific events and methods, and leave only generic ones. I.e. the control won’t raise BoxCreated, TableCreated, ContainerCreated, etc. events, but just NodeCreated. Similarly, there won’t be a set of Create, Find and GetAt methods for each type, but just a common method used for all node types.

This will help you integrate custom types seamlessly into the Flowchart.NET API, and having a common event handler for an action done on several node types could be good too.

The bad side is that there will be some type casting and reflection needed when handling/calling such generic events and methods. And of course there will be more work needed to port your applications to the new API.

Please let us know your opinion.

g.

If you have an active upgrade subscription, you will receive version 5 as a part of it. We are already past the scheduled release date, and might defer some of the planned features to v.5.0.1. Hopefully we'll release a beta version in a couple of weeks.

Stoyan

Hi all,

Here is a new update along with a sample project.

https://mindfusion.org/_samples/ControlNodes.zip

1. ControlHost  nodes

a) The sample shows how ControlHost nodes can be used in the new MDI model. The first view in the sample form lets you draw buttons and text boxes.

b) As you know a Windows Forms control cannot be contained in more than one parent control at the same time. So actually the controls are hosted in only one of the views. In all other views Flowhart.NET tries to paint them by either calling their OnPaint method (e.g. check the buttons in the example) or by raising an event that will let you draw some representation of the controls yourself (e.g. check the text boxes).

c) DiagramView provides an AdoptHostedControl method that moves the controls to the calling view. In a MDI application you can call this method when a view becomes active.

2. How exporter components handle your custom drawing code.

a) Now all drawing methods, either custom-draw event handlers or DiagramItem.Draw overrides, receive an IGraphics interface reference. When drawing to screen, Flowchart.NET passes a GdiGraphics implementation of that interface, which simply delegates the method calls to GDI+.

b) Components that export diagrams to various graphics formats can implement the IGraphics interface and call the Diagram.Draw method passing an instance of the class that implements IGraphics. This will let you create exporters to various formats that are not natively supported by Flowchart.NET.

c) An SvgGraphics implementation will be included in the version 5 release, so any custom drawing code will be reflected in files created by the SvgExporter.

d) We had been planning to include a PdfGraphics implementation as well, but due to time constraints we deferred it to the 5.0.1 release.

3. More API changes

The .NET library design guidelines state that class names should differ from the names of classes included with the base .NET class library. It is also recommended to use a common name suffix for classes derived from the same base type. Since there are Table and Container classes both in FlowChart.NET and in the .NET class library, we have renamed the node types as follows:

Node       -> DiagramNode
Box          -> ShapeNode
Table       -> TableNode
Container-> ContainerNode

That's for now. Hopefully we will be ready with the containers implementation next week and will start the beta tests.

g.

Hi Chris,

Yes, you will be able to place other nodes and links inside container nodes. We will try to post here a preview version with the initial ContainerNode implementation by the end of this week.

Stoyan

We will start beta tests in a couple of weeks, and then the release date will depend on how many bugs our developers will have to fix.

Regards,
Stoyan

A few questions regarding the containers,

I take it from your previous post that we will be able to nest containers, will there be a limit on how many levels of nesting are allowed?

Will we be able to make custom container nodes?

If one is following the flow from a linked node into a container, will there be a way to link from external node -> container (entry) -> internal node -> container (exit) - another external node?

Using the example, I could link from an external node to the container entry and container exit to an external node.  But I could not link from the container entry to an internal node, or an internal node to the container exit.