Introducing Submanagers

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Chapter 5, Managers and Chapter 6, Graphers of The Essential JViews Framework manual introduced the manager (IlvManager) and its subclass the grapher (IlvGrapher). The manager and the grapher are the main classes that can contain graphic objects for displaying and manipulating in several views.

The manager and grapher are themselves graphic objects that can be embedded inside another manager or grapher. This nesting feature of ILOG JViews allows you to create applications that display a graph inside another graph. An example is shown in Figure 1.1.

In this figure, the object titled "Obtain Supplies" is a grapher (instance of IlvGrapher) that itself contains two other graphers, titled "deliver supplies" and "pay for supplies." The figure shows that a manager (and a grapher) can be surrounded by a frame; in this example the three (blue) frames each display the name of the manager as a title. This type of decoration as well as the background of the submanager can be completely customized. Another feature shown in this example is the fact that links between nodes can cross subgraph boundaries. Such links are called intergraph links.