Graphiti "New and Noteworthy"

This document describes the new development topics that were addressed during the milestones towards the release 0.9.2 within the Juno release train.

SR2

Bug fixes for the SR2 service release of Graphiti 0.9.2

Bug 383768

The method getConfigurationProvider() in the class DiagramEditor was not accessible by clients. This caused the need to have multiple configuration providers inside one editor in case clients would like to work with it (it's needed e.g. for registering custom actions for custom features). The downported fix is simply making the method protected and accessible for clients, the real fix for this bug that has been provided for Graphiti 0.10.0 is not part of the downport.

Bug 389380

A bug in the undo stack handling in the Graphiti editor has been fixed that caused the wrong feature command to appear at the top of the undo stack under certain conditions.

Bug 391506

A bug in the editor feature processing was fixed that caused an editor to get dirty in case a connection creation feature was abandoned.

Bug 392309

Showing a tooltip that is too long to fit into the viewport of the diagram will no longer cause that scroll bars appear.

Bug 393113

Selecting a connection in e.g. the Eclipse Project Explorer with enabled editor linking will now select and reveal the connection in the opened diagram editor in case it exists in the diagram.

Bug 394801

Properties passed in the AddContext will now correctly be passed to the called add feature.

Bug 397303

An accessibility issue with showing the context button pad in high contrast mode has been fixed (pad background and border were painted in standard colors).

Bug 397346

A focus issue within direct editing has been fixed.

SR1

Bug fixes for the SR1 service release of Graphiti 0.9.1

Bug 384330

A wrong method reference has been fixed in the Graphiti documentation.

Bug 383512

A bug when moving a polyline has been fixed that lead to wrong positioning of the moved shape when the line does not start at position 0, 0.

Bug 380439

The DefaultRemoveFeature now also removes connections of nested shapes.

Bug 385586

A bug causing the remove, delete and update entries to be always shown in the context menu and context button pad has been fixed. The entries are now hidden when they are not available and disabled when they cannot be executed.

Bug 388211

The wizard to create a new Eclipse plug-in project containing a Graphiti diagram editor always added a dependency to org.eclipse.ui even if it was not necessary. This caused issues with creating a Graphiti editor for an e4 RCP application. Now the wizard creates that dependency only in case an activator class is created as well.

Bug 388335

A wrong statement in the JavaDoc of IFeature has been corrected.

Bug 388213

Graphiti defines an optional dependency to org.eclipse.ui.ide, but this dependency was needed for two import statements used for JavaDoc. The imports were removed to prevent runtime errors when that plug-in is not installed.

Bug 387971

A bug in the framework that prevented selection notifications being forwarded to the registered actions when the diagram editor was embedded inside a multi page editor has been fixed. This caused that e.g. some of the context menu entries were not correctly enabled or diasabled.

RC4

The main focus for this milestone has been set testing and making minor final corrections.

RC3

The main focus for this milestone has been set on documentation round-offs.

Bug 325084

The Graphiti pattern concept is now documented in the Graphiti help. JavaDoc has been updated for the classes relevant for building patterns.

Bug 379825

A broken link in the Graphiti documentation has been fixed. Also the missing links in the table of contents for the JavaDoc have been added.

Bug 363265

The Graphiti tutorial has been played through to check if it is still up-to-date. Necessary adaptations have been made.

Bug 350814

API filters in the Graphiti framework have been cleaned up.

Bug 371527

A bug in the action enablement check has been fixed that caused runtime exceptions on Linux machines because of intersecting part activations has been fixed.

Bug 381312

Two UI update issues have been fixed in the create new Graphiti plugin wizard.

Bug 381437

A bug in the contribution of menus that lead to an IllegalStateException when starting a Graphiti diagram editor in an RCP application without edit menu has been fixed.

RC2

The main focus for this milestone has been set on documentation round-offs.

Bug 380400

The method remove in DefaultRemoveFeature is no longer final to enable clients to modify the standard remove functionality in a more flexible way.

Bug 378828

An exception after pressing Shift-Del in a Graphiti editor within Eclipse 4.2 because of a wrong key binding has been fixed. The exception did not occur in Eclipse 3.8 because of a slightly different execution order, but was caused by an erroneous definition in Graphiti.

Bug 375497

The create new Graphiti editor bundle wizard has been enhanced to allow users to reference domain objects and to support patterns. The functional extension has long been prepared but could only be activated now because of the availability of a needed API in JDT UI.

Bug 350259

Documentation for the Graphiti Test Preferences page has been added in the Eclipse help. This preference page provides means besides of debugging to identify and analyse issues in Graphiti framework or tool coding. The page itself existed for some releases already, but had never been documented.

Bug 358818

A gap in the documentation for the copy & paste functionality regarding the save state of EObjects to be copied has been closed.

RC1

The main focus for this milestone has been set on bugfixing.

Bug 371717

A bug in synchronizing the feature execution on the Graphiti command stack has been solved. Clients are now able to execute features also from other threads.

Bug 377783

The Graphiti debug feature has been enhanced to allow users to dump not only the tree of the shapes on a diagram but to also inlcude the connections into that dump.

Bug 378301

A rendering issue has been solved that lead to a small gap between the right-hand end of a connection and its anchor shape has been solved.

Bug 379788

A memory leak in the Graphiti Diagram Editor has been fixed. A listener registered to the editing domain by the DefaultMarkerBehavior is now removed when the editor closes.

Bug 379836

A stack overflow in case of an invalid shape hierarchy has been fixed. The user now gets a hopefully more helpful error stating the invalid object.

M7

The main focus for this milestone has been set on

Plug-in Project Creation Wizard

Graphiti now provides a wizard that helps starting a new editor project. It's hooked into the Eclipse create new Plug-in Project Wizard and allows to create the relevant extensions to the Graphiti extension points and generates a basic version of a feature set to create, add and layout a new shape type and connections between these shapes.

Modification of Selection and Hover State for Anchors

Graphiti now allows clients to change the way anchors are shown when they are selected or hovered over. Until now this was possible only for shapes and connections.

Modification of the Name of the Generic Context Buttons

Graphiti now allows to clients to change the name and description of the generic context buttons (delete, remove, update) by simply overriding the getName() and get Description() methods in their features.

Undo/Redo is now Possible after Saving

The Graphiti Diagram Editor now allows users to trigger undo/redo even after the editor has been saved. Until now the undo/redo stack was cleared while saving the editor, blocking undo after that operation. Now all editors can be undone or redone without hitting that block.

Hide Underlying Text while Direct Editing is Enabled

For MultiLineText shapes the current text is now hidden when direct editing is enabled. Showing both texts (the current one on the diagram and the edited one in the direct editing popup) was irritating and looked ugly.

Documentation of Graphic Algorithm Properties

A section in the Graphiti documentation in Graphic Algorithm properties has been introduced. It answers some questions that were aften asked on the effect of these properties.

Link with Editor Example

The Graphiti tutorial implementation now provides an example how to implement the Eclipse functionality "link with editor" for the Project Explorer.

Bug 375533

A bug in the copy and paste implementation of the tutorial causing an update issue has been fixed.

Bug 361414

A bug in the copy and paste framework functionality that enabled pasting at too many locations has been fixed. Allowing to paste at some of these locations confused users.

Bug 374744

A bug in the usage of the local transfer object in the copy and paste framework functionality has been fixed.

Bug 374918

A standard copy and paste functionality of the Graphiti framework is now based on the usage of the local transfer object and does not use additional transfer objects.

Bug 374701

A bug in the location calculation of the paste context has been fixed. When a diagram was scrolled or zoomed a wrong location was set to the paste context.

Bug 378083

The Diagram Editor did not get the focus after a drop operation took place into a diagram.

Bug 368124

A bug in the calculation of the position of text decorators for connections has been fixed.

Bug 370440

A bug in the rendering engine that caused lines to be visualized thicker than they should be has been fixed.

Bug 374190

A bug in the rendering engine, causing a rotated text to disappear, has been fixed.

Bug 376008

A bug in the Diagram Editor has been fixed that caused NullPointerExceptions while browsing through the list of recently opened editors.

Bug 371513

A bug in the Diagram Editor causing a NullPointerException in a special situation has been fixed.

Bug 378342

A bug in the Diagram Editor causing that only the first diagram in an EMF resource could be opened has been fixed.

Bug 375037

A bug in the SVG export causing an exception has been fixed.

Bug 369241

A bug in the SVG export has been fixed so that rotated objects are now also rendered correctly in the exported SVG file.

Bug 373298

A resource leak in the Graphiti framework with respect to font handling has been fixed. Tooltip fonts were not freed correctly.

Bug 376544

A bug in the Graphiti framework with respect to reconnecting a connection has been fixed. In case of source and target anchors being identical, source and target were swapped.

Bug 377475

A bug in the AbstractCustomfeature has been fixed. Clients may have run into infinite recursions causing an exception.

Bug 375122

A typo in the turial plugin.xml has been fixed.

M6

The main focus for this milestone has been set on rounding off the Graphiti functionality by providing some features requested (and partly contributed) by the community. Also several bugfixes are part of this milestone.

Border and Color Decorators

Graphiti supports new decorator types for shapes (besides the already supported Image decorators). It is now possible to add decorators that change the way the border or the colors of a shape are displayed without modifying the diagram itself. This could e.g. be used to highlight possible target shapes while drawing a connection; the following screenshot shows the Chess Example while drawing a move connection.

Composite Connections

Graphiti again supports a new connection type: Composite Connections can group Curved Connections (Splines) now. This set of connections appears as one connection with several lines to the user. Note that this new connection type is still experimental and that its API might be subject to change in upcoming versions.

Make Graphics Algorithm Service Extensible

The Graphiti service to create Graphics Algorithms can now be extended by clients to change the default settings for the involved attributes. By doing that it is e.g. possible to define an own default font and size that is used for Text and MultiText objects created within one tool. The affected class GaServiceImpl has been moved to a public API package and has been adapted accordingly.

Advanced Property Sheet Support

It is now possible to define Eclipse AdvancedPropertySheets using only official Graphiti APIs; they appear as a standard table format property sheet within a tabbed property sheet page. To enable that there are new base classes (org.eclipse.graphiti.ui.platform.GraphitiShapeEditPart and org.eclipse.graphiti.ui.platform.GraphitiConnectionEditPart) that can be added to the plugin.xml instead of the formally needed internal classes. For more details on this see the linked bug and the documentation on creating property sheets for diagrams.

Feature for Export Functionality

There is now a new Eclipse P2 feature that wraps the export functionality (export diagram as SVG graphics) that can be used to install this functionality along with the Graphiti framework only. Before the export functionality could only be installed with the complete SDK including also the samples.

Anchor Documentation

The documentation on anchors has been improved, all anchor types are explained now and there's an example code snippet how to use them.

Export Diagram Improvements

A bug in the export for large diagrams has been fixed. It is now possible to export much larger diagrams. In the cause of this bugfix a new "export to PNG" functionality has been added.

Bug 371671

A bug in the dark feature processing mode causing an add feature to return null has been fixed.

Bug 369370

A bug in updating the context button pad for nested shapes has been fixed.

Bug 365536

A bug in the size calculation for Texts has been fixed that caused unnecessary ellipsis showing in certain situations.

M5

The main focus for this milestone has been set on finalizing the Graphiti API especially in the Diagram Editor area. Also some functional enhancements are part of this milestone.

Move DiagramEditor base classes to public API

The Graphiti Diagram Editor has been moved to a public package and has been reworked to offer a better and more understandable API now. It has been split into several classes to achieve a better separation of concerns and to avoid one huge DiagramEditor class. The different aspects have been separated into several Default*Behavior classes clients can exchange to modify the default behavior. The API has been cleaned up, unneeded methods have been removed, some methods have been made accessible to clients in cases where we see the need to modify the behavior of the editor. Also classes around the editor have have been reworked to be easier to understand and to be leaner. This especially affects the DiagramEditorInput, which has been stripped down to no longer hold a reference to the diagram object itself and an editing domain. It only holds a URI that can be used to gain hold of the diagram. The changes make it easier for clients to change the editor behavior while being able to reuse most or parts of the standard functionality. Another goal we wanted to achieve was to keep as much of the original API and functionality available (although probably moved to another class) to make adoption by clients as easy as possible. Nevertheless this is a breaking change in non-API classes that were referenced by many users, so clients might need to adapt their coding after migrating to M5.

Editor Listener Optimizations

The listeners (EMF adapters) that are installed for a Diagram Editor have been optimized. Similar tasks are now done in just one listener instead of several. Together with the task of the editor API rework it has been eased to replace listeners by client functionality and the JavaDoc describing the listener purposes has been enhanced.

Curved Connections

Graphiti supports a new connection type now: Splines can now be used for displaying curved connection.

DirectEditingFeature with Custom Type

An enhancement in direct editing has been implemented: clients can now provide their own cell editors for direct editing. Simply set the direct editing type to TYPE_CUSTOM (TYPE_DIALOG has been renamed) and implement the interface org.eclipse.graphiti.ui.platform.ICellEditorProvider in the direct editing feature. By doing that you can hook in your own cell editor that will be used during direct editing.

Images can be Scaled

Graphiti images (graphics algorithm subclass Image) support now scaling. If a vertical and horizontal scale factor is set, it is now reflected in the diagram. Also the proportional flag is evaluated correctly.

Selection Width of Connections is now Setable

The selection width for connections (how far the tool user can click besides a connection ans still select it) is now configurable by the method getLineSelectionWidth(Polyline polyline) in the tool behavior provider.

Rework UI Dialogs

The Graphiti form-based UIs were reworked and cleaned-up. This affects mostly the print and save-as popups.

Improve Tutorial with theory behind of styles and new create-"plain"-methods

The Graphiti tutorial now correctly describes the Styles concept that can be used to define coherently looking shapes. Also there's a chapter describing the theory behind Styles in the online documentation now.

Extend JavaDoc of IGaCreateService

The JavaDoc of the Graphiti creation service for graphics algorithms has been improved; e.g. it describes all the default value now.

Bug 324556

A bug in the selection propagation to GEF has been fixed that prevented an easy way of implementing hiding and showing shapes to enable a simple collapse/expand functionality.

Bug 348844

A bug causing a file conflict dialogue misbehavior (popup appearing after each editor change) has been fixed.

Bug 368146

A bug causing a runtime exception during SVG export has been fixed.

Bug 367204

A bug causing the method addIfPossible in the AbstractFeatureProvider to always returns null has been fixed.

Bug 367552

An error in the Graphiti documentation has been fixed.

M4

The main focus for this milestone has been set on implementing round-offs especially in the area of custom anchors and styles.

Ease use of styles

To ease the usage of styles in Graphiti, there are now new methods (createPlain...) in the creation service for graphics algorithms that create graphics algorithms without any attributes set; by that one can directly use styles to define the properties of the graphics algorithms, without having to reset any attributes.

Documentation on Styles

The Graphiti tutorial has been reworked to explain the styles concept in a better and deeper way; this affects both the written version in the Eclipse help system and the tutorial plugin that is part of the SDK download. The new documentation also reflects the new styles related creation methods for graphics algorithms as described in the Ease use of styles entry for M4.

Decorators for Connection Texts

Graphiti now allows to add decorators to connection texts that do not overlap the text itself. This was not possible so far because decorators were added directly to the shape which was in this case the text itself. Users can simply add decorators to texts now and can now position them by the standard means as they like and are used to in other shapes.

Hiding of Selection Tools

It is now possible to hide the connection tools from the palette of the diagram editor. There are 2 new methods (isShowSelectionTool and isShowMarqueeTool) in the tool behavior provider that allow clients to modify the standard behavior and hide the selection tool and/or the marquee tool from the palette.

DefaultDeleteFeature allows Access to setDoneChanges

Subclasses of DefaultDeleteFeature can now use the standard behavior to indicate that no changes have been made while performing (or rather not performing) a delete operation. This has been achieved by increasing the visibility of the method setDoneChanges to allow clients to access and override it.

Disabling the Context Buttons

End users of Graphiti editors can now prevent that the context buttons will appear when hovering with the mouse over a shape. This can be done permanently using a toolbar button or by holding the Control key (Command key on OS X) while moving the mouse.

Alligned FixPointAnchor and BoxRelativeAnchor

The behaviour of FixPointAnchors and BoxRelativeAnchors is now aligned, especially dragging a connection from a FixPointAnchor now works as it did for BoxRelativeAnchors already before. In the cause of processing this bug the coding on Graphiti side was very much streamligned.

Angle of MultiText

Until now MultiTexts could not be rotated although the angle attribute could be set for them. Now the method setAngle() has an impact in the graphical representation. The angle is specified in degrees, 0 degrees corresponds to the 3 o'clock position. A positive value indicates a clockwise rotation while a negative value indicates a counter-clockwise rotation of the text. The developer is responsible for the correct size and location of the MultiLineText GA.

Nested Anchor Shapes

Graphiti now supports drawing nested shapes for representing anchors. These shapes can now be defined for FixPointAnchors and BoxRelativeAnchors and are correctly rendered by the framework.

Bug 355968

An issue in the calculation of the position of FixPointAnchors and BoxRelativeAnchors caused a presentation issue in some cases. This has been fixed and the anchors are displayed at the correct location now in all cases.

Bug 352440

A bunch of warnings inside the Graphiti framework coding has been removed, especially caused by the need to be compatible with the Eclipse 3.6 version of GEF (3.6). Now Graphiti switched to support a minimal version of GEF 3.7 (part of Eclipse Indigo) at least and therefore was able to remove some GEF deprecations warnings. Also some further warnings in Graphiti coding have been removed.

Bug 361932

Graphiti is now source compatible with JDK 1.5. This was done to ease integration with some modeling projects that use this Java version. Now users will be able to run the Graphiti framework on top of Java 5

Bug 363539

A missing implementation of the method executeFeature in the dummy editor caused dark feature processing to fail.

Bug 364035

Fixed a bug in DefaultReconnectionFeature that made it hard for clients to force a connection to a specific anchor.

Bug 363464

The method layoutPictogramElement in AbstractFeature now returns an IReason object that indicates the result of the layout operation.

bug 364124

Fixed typo errors in the tutorial documentation.

M3

The main focus for this milestone has been set implementing round-offs both in functionality and documentation.

New Chess Diagram Example

The Chess Diagram Editor as shown in a demo at EclipseCon Europe 2011 is now part of the Graphiti samples and available as part of the Graphiti SDK download. A screenshot of the tool can be seen in the next entry.

State Callbacks during Connection Creation

Graphiti now offers state callbacks during the creation of a new connection. There are hooks for starting and ending a connection, but also for the state when the connection is attached to its source anchor. This allows for example highlighting of allowed targets for the connection.

State Callbacks during Reconnect

The reconnection feature now provides a hook that allows the tool developer to react to reconnect cancellations.

Allow Paste to Location

The paste context now provides additional information about the location of the paste operation to allow pasting to a user-defined location.

Provide Resize Direction

The resize context now provides additional information on the direction in which the shape is being resized to allow e.g. better placement of child shapes.

Unconditional Editor Refresh

The Graphiti diagram editor now offers an unconditional refresh mode. Tool developers can enable this mode by overriding the isAutoRefreshXXX methods in the tool behaviour provider.

Documentation

The complete Graphiti documentation has been reformatted, is easier to read and looks much nicer now. Besides some bugs in the documentation and the tutorial have been fixed and some smaller gaps especially in the styles concept have been filled.

Bug 359221

Connection were not removed on the removal of their originating anchor.

Bug 359222

Moving an anchor shape caused jumping of that shape.

Bug 359928

Fixed a minor initialisation issue in DiagramEditorBehaviour.

Bug 360800

The background colour attribute for Texts was ignored. As an effect of this fix Graphiti introduced version numbers for diagrams; for older versions than 0.9.0 the Graphiti diagram editor will perform an auto migration of the background colour attribute of Text objects to correctly display the background colour (this behaviour can be changed by the tool developer). For details on this please have a look into the bug report. Involves diagram migration!

Bug 359112

Fixed an issue in resizing of the direct editing field for connection decorators.

Bug 357878

Fixed a strange behaviour when adding bendpoints.

Bug 359526

Fixed a NullPointerException in the refresh handling for non file-based editors.

M2

The main focus for this milestone has again been set on bugfixing and implementing round-offs. Besides project related tasks were focused.

Bug 357764

Fixed an index out of bounds exception during refresh in connection with rendering decorators.

Bug 352200

The method moveShape in the default move feature is no longer final.

Reworked styles

The styles concept in Graphiti has been reworked. There are new creator methods for graphics algorithms that do not set any default attributes (createPlain...) that prevent you from having to reset certain attributes in order to enable the value set at a style. For details see Bug 352542.

Bug 355401

Fixed performance issue with printing under Linux.

Bug 356090

Fixed bug with hasDoneChanges for delete feature in patterns.

Bug 354824

Fixed bug in positioning within FixPointAnchors.

Bug 352220

Cleaned-up the disabling of guides inside the editor. Note: this can affect tool builders since this is a - very minor - change in API.

Bug 355027

Fixed a bug in moving connection decorators in a zoomed diagram.

Bug 355347

Fixed a bug in colours and fonts that invalidated the Graphiti object management. Colours and Fonts are now immutable. Note: this can affect tool builders since this is a small change in API.

Bug 356218

Fixed a bug in auto update at startup that caused the editor to open dirty in any case.

Bug 356828

Fixed a bug in editor title decoding.

Bug 351226

Improved editor behaviour when renaming or deleting a file.

Bug 357411

Removed some unnecessary reflection coding.

Bug 357417

DiagramEditorInput now adapts to IFile.

Bug 357549

Fixed a bug in setting names and descriptions for creation entries.