When you have populated your data model, and defined your notation, you still need to provide your user with a means of interacting with the diagram.

Modeling applications require interactions for creating nodes of many sorts, for creating links with various shapes, for setting user-defined properties, for selecting nodes and links, for moving nodes around, for editing subgraphs, and so forth.

JViews Diagrammer offers a wide range of interactors that implement the most common editing actions. When an interactor is installed on a view, it handles the user events, transmits the changes to the data model, and refreshes the view.

Monitoring applications often require a subset of the interactions proposed in modeling applications. The most common ones are zoom, pan, and selection. In monitoring applications, the selection is often specific to the application: when the user selects a node or a link, JViews Diagrammer performs a specific action like opening a dialog box or selecting all the alarms generated by the selected object. To implement application-specific interactions, you will have to derive new interactors from existing ones using the documented API provided with the SDK.