[Kde-extra-gear] KGraphViewer ideas ...

[Sandro Andrade]

Hi everyone (in particular, Gaël)

As I've mentioned before I'm implementing the KDevelop features for
software visualization. I've been told about the KGraphViewer kpart
and I think is a good idea to working on it, so that both applications
get improved.

Basically, what we need is a kpart for digraph visualization with the
following features:

- Rendering of nodes as rounded rectangles with particular labels
- Response to mouse events identifying the target node

Browsing the kpart source code I've noticed that it supports most of
node and edge attributes specified in the DOT language. It seems to
provide more features than I actually need, so some questions arise:

1) Is this kpart intended to be a graph editor ? Wouldn't it be
interesting to provide just exhibition features and shift interaction
responsibilities to the application or another higher level kpart ? In
KDevelop we aren't going to use edit, export or print features.

2) Can I implement, in the application, the code to be executed when a
graph node is clicked or has a mouse over event ? Again, wouldn't the
kpart have its reuse improved if such interaction features were not
pre-defined ?

3) Why haven't you used Graphviz as a library (as indicated in
http://www.graphviz.org/pdf/libguide.pdf) instead of relying in
QProcess invocation of dot, twopi and output processing (I know, this
is the KCachegrind approach) ?

Thanks in advance,
-- 
Sandro Santos Andrade
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Distributed Systems Laboratory (LaSiD)
Computer Science Department (DCC)
Federal University of Bahia
Brazil