Hello! First post here - good afternoon from Sydney!
I have a problem that I'm sure most people would have come across before, and I thought maybe this would be the place to ask. We have a graphical model showing connections between approximately 300 items. It was automatically generated with all of the objects in the top left corner of the model.
I now need to layout the model so that it is readable. However, the built-in layouts are not effective in displaying this quantity of information, and a manual layout will take hours of work. What I'm looking for is something more like a force-directed layout or an orthogonal layout algorithm. (I cannot post the links here, but there are Wikipedia articles outlining these types of algorithms.)
Has anybody found a solution for this kind of layout problem before?
Thanks Rune, I didn't know about that macro - it looks like it could be quite useful for some of our library models and it's going in the toolkit!
However, in this case most of the meaning of the model comes from the many relationships between the objects. The best layout for a model of this type would be one where closely related objects are positioned close together, and unrelated objects are positioned further apart. So while the macro could help a bit, I don't think it quite solves my problem.
I'm strong in JavaScript/ArisScript so I'm quite happy to plug in existing Java or JavaScript libraries if that's needed. So far I have tried the Springy.js (getspringy.com) algorithm but this assumes that one is working inside a web browser, so I've been really close but, so far, unsuccessful.
There are some other potential solutions out there in the form of JGraphT, GraphStream and Prefuse. Unfortunately I have also had some trouble getting these to play nicely with ARIS; especially JGraphT with its use of Java generics.
Any continued help would be greatly appreciated - and thanks again!
