Hi,

With most of the layout classes you can use their Anchoring property to control that, but we haven't implemented it yet for FlowLayout. Anyway, after applying a layout, you could set for each link the positions of its first/last points (in DiagramLink.ControlPoints) to align them to the center of some side of the related nodes.

Stoyan

Forgot why I started that post  ..

I could really do with the Anchoring property on the FlowchartLayout too.. any idea when/if it will be implemented?

Thanks

Tom

Oh that is bad news

Thanks for filling me in Stoyan, that explains a lot.

That leaves me with a dilemma:  the FlowChart.net control is the only one I have found that deals with lanes and in theory it does exactly what we need. 

Looking at Amadee's system this isn't suprising as although the software we are writing does a different think to Amadee's, it is also based on the ideas of Activites/Tasks inside business processes.

I'd like to go with the MindFusion solution, but if our issues are realistically going to only be addressed after Amadee's, or if they do not conflict with Amadee's requirements then this will clearly be a problem for us (especially considering the deadline for our project!).

Just to be clear, none of this is a criticism of you guys; it makes perfect sense for you guys to work with one company first to get the first version of the flowlayout sorted and I really appreciate you explaining the situation.  Many companyies would have said 'we'll deal with it' and then not done so.

So, in short, do you have enough developers to help us to, or should we look for a different solution - or consider implementing a different/custom layout instead?

Thanks in advance,

Tom

Well, in theory it should work with any kinds of rules you define, but we don't know yet how well this works in practice We are working under contract and deadline on the layout, so we can't make any big changes to it right now, but can implement some small features such as aligning all groups to the left instead of stepping them.

Stoyan

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understood!

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Know the feeling!!

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Great stuff, if you guys can get the sub groups aligning left and cure the layout hanging bug then I reckon we can take care of the rest once we understand the logic the flowlayout is using.

Many thanks for all your help so far,

Tom

Thanks Stoyan, that fits exactly with what we are after from the layout
With regards to 'Groups', can I just clarify I have understood this correctly? Does this mean (my words):

A collection of nodes connected by links with logic id's matching that set for the flowLayoutRules.NodeRules.MainConnectorId property, and where the start node is defined by a node with a logicid added to the flowLayoutRules.NodeRules.GroupStartNodes array and an end node with a logic id that appears in the flowLayoutRules.NodeRules.GroupEndNodes array?

If I have this right then the actual name "ControlFlow" used in the ProcessLayout example is irrelevant except that both the links' logic ids and the flowLayoutRules.NodeRules.MainConnectorId must use the same name for this connector?

(the same goes for all the node logic id names I think?)

I take it that if the above is correct then branching control flow would be a bad idea (better to use a connector with a different logic id)?

Or is a group something else altogether?

I just want to auto-arrange a diagram to look like this:

http://home.comcast.net/~jonsberndt/Photos/ControlSystem.png

Jon