Designer for ILOG JViews Diagrammer is a point-and-click editor for easily specifying most aspects of a diagram (the Dashboard Editor is used with dashboard displays). It is well-suited for defining the look and feel of applications that must automatically create a diagram—such as a business process, a network typology, a workflow, a dataflow, or entity-relational diagrams—from a data source.

Designer for ILOG JViews Diagrammer. Enlarge image (opens a new window).

Use
Designer creates a display by binding symbols with data sources. The process works as follows:

• Symbols are defined with the Symbol Editor. They are then imported into Designer.
• A data source is specified (using JDBC, XML, CSV, or others languages), populating the data model.
• Developers bind parameters from the symbols to fields in the data model using simple point-and-click actions.
• Developers specify the appearance of graphics under different data conditions (for example, a symbol can change color or shape when a particular data value is reached).

Other aspects of the display, such as graph layout options, the appearance of links, background images, aspects of sub-graphs, and the zooming policy can also be finely tuned. Developers can also test the interaction of the resulting diagram using the editor’s test mode.

The end result is a project that is loaded into the application at runtime. The project’s individual elements can be accessed through the Diagrammer software development kit (SDK) , allowing the look or behavior of the display to be customized further.

Features include:

• A data connection wizard
• Definitions of symbols to use, based on the data model
• Configuration of style rules for adding custom logic to symbols and links
• The ability to define variants of the symbols based on zoom level, or other criteria
• Configuration of automatic graph layout, link routing and label layout options
• Styling of graphs and sub-graphs
• Specification of the background image (static image, vector-graphics background or map)
• Configuration of the zoom policy
• Configuration dynamic legends
• Preview mode with interactive modeling functions