Describes the wizards provided with the Designer to guide you through the creation of diagrams and style rules.

The New Diagram Wizard allows you to specify the data on which a diagram is to be based and the initial look of the diagram. You can then refine the styling by working in Style Editing mode, see Working in Style Editing mode.

To open the New Diagram Wizard, choose File>New from Wizard. By default, this wizard is open when you run the Designer; you can disable this behavior from the first page of the wizard.

The New Diagram Wizard has the following pages:

The Create Style Rule wizard simplifies the definition of data rules which can include attribute conditions.

To open the Create Style Rule wizard, choose Edit>Create Style Ruleor right-click a rule and choose Create Style Rule in the pop-up menu.

Whenever you create (or change) a style rule, a Welcome page displays. If you do not want to see it open each time, clear the box Show Welcome page at the lower left of the page. Following the Welcome page, the Conditions page displays, where you can define the conditions of the rule. See the following figure:

Node and link rules

In the Conditions page, the style rule name will be automatically computed from the conditions that you define in the pane below. You can however customize this name by clearing the Generated Name option and typing your preferred name in the text field. Another option is to rename a rule in the Style Rules tree: right-click the rule and select Rename in the pop-up menu. Please note that you can at any time switch back to the generated name by checking the Generated Name box.

Conditions

You can define conditions for user-defined types, states, and attributes:

You can set a more or less restrictive rule by adding more or less conditions. The plus sign (+) allows you to add a condition. The minus sign (-) removes the corresponding condition. The more conditions a rule has, the more it is specific and the higher its priority.

An attribute condition tests one or more attributes against a value. If you select an attribute, you must then set a condition on its value by selecting an operator from the second drop-down list and entering a value. You can set several attribute conditions.

The operator drop-down list reflects the type of the attribute: integer, real or string. For integer or real attributes, the operator menu offers equals, does not equal, greater than, greater than or equal to, less than, less than or equal to. For string attributes, the operator menu offers equals, does not equal, contains. You can also simply test the presence of an attribute in the data model ( exists and not null ).

Viewing the data model in the style rule wizards

The Create Style Rule Wizard and the Change Style Rule Wizard both display a table view of the data model in the Nodes and Links tabs of the Conditions page. The tables show the property names and the current value for each property, on separate tabs for nodes and links.

When you create or change rules in one of these wizards, you can view the data properties and values that you can use to set conditions by selecting the Nodes or Links tabs.

The Change Style Rule Wizard simplifies the changing of the conditions in data rules. The content is the same as in the Create Style Rule Wizard, see Create Style Rule wizard.

To open the Change Style Rule Wizard, choose Edit>Change Style Rule or right-click a rule and choose Change Style Rule in the pop-up menu.

The Graph Layout Wizard allows you to select a customized graph layout that is appropriate to the purpose of the diagram. This wizard sets a layout and customizes some property settings.

To open the Graph Layout Wizard, click the wizard icon in the Styling Customizer for the Graph Layout option. This icon is the top button of the vertical toolbar to the left.

The same functionality is available as a page within the New Diagram Wizard, see New Diagram wizard.

The layout themes available are as follows:

The Data wizard allows you to modify the data on which a diagram is based. The styling rules set for the diagram are not affected by the changes.

To open the Data wizard, go to Diagram Editing mode and choose Data>Edit Model.

The Data wizard has the following pages:

In this wizard you can:

When modifying the data model, be aware that model properties may already be used in the style rules defined for the diagram. If you change a property name, the affected style rules may become inconsistent. Therefore, when you try to remove or rename a property, a warning message will be displayed indicating the style rules that will be affected by the operation, if any. In case you need to rename a property, the preferred path is to create the new property and modify the style rules to depend on this new property. Once this is done, you can safely remove the previous property using the Data wizard.