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pmclean
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Reviewing Software needs some help
Apr 20th, 2008 at 2:31pm
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Hi all. Found this site while searching for drawing libraries. I'm looking for a library that allows the following:

1) Ability to dynamically display shapes in a shape template that can then be dragged onto a designer sheet. An example would be a shape template called user that queries a database or LDAP server and dynamically builds the shapes based on the result set and allows these to be dragged to the designer

2) Ability to control the export of the developed diagram to XML for use in another application.

3) Ability to do this in a Visio style interface.

4) Control over each shapes customer properties and the ability to set them dynamically.

5) Ability to set a text editor component for editing a custom property. Example would be a custom property that when edited uses a 3rd party control to edit, validate and save the data back to the property.

Any help is greatly appreciated. I am working on developing a GUI interface that allows our business analysts to design applications; export those definitions as XML and use that XML to drive both business logic and navigation in a custom development framework.
  
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Stoyo
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Re: Reviewing Software needs some help
Reply #1 - Apr 21st, 2008 at 8:56am
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Hi,

1) For custom shapes, you can use either ShapeNode nodes with custom Shape objects, or add any WPF UIControl to the designer surface. In the latter case, use WPFPoint as a MeasureUnit. Check the TreeLayout sample to see how to allow adding nodes to the diagram through drag-and-drop.

2) The SaveToXml method exports the diagram to XML, but you don't have control over the export format. You can implement your own XML export by iterating over the diagram's Nodes and Links collections, and writing the properties you are interested in to XML via the classes from the .NET's Xml classes.

3) The control provides only the design surface. How the rest of the user interface will be implemented is up to you.

4) You could implement custom properties as a Hashtable assigned to the Tag property of nodes. That will let you add custom properties dynamically at run-time.

5) You could display any 3rd party control in response to the NodeClicked or NodeDoubleClicked events, and then validate data and close it when the user tabs away or clicks outside the control.

I hope that helps,
Stoyan
  
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