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is a visual editor for Dataflow programming

flow-view

is a visual editor for dataflow programming

Demo
flow view Simpsons example

Installation

Using npm

With npm do

npm install flow-view

Using a CDN

Try this in your HTML page

<script type="module">
  import { FlowView } from 'https://unpkg.com/flow-view';

  const flowView = new FlowView();
</script>

Old school

Just download the flow-view.js build from here, upload it wherever you like and load it with a script tag like

<script type="module" src="https://your.domain.com/path/to/flow-view.js"></script>

Usage

GUI

Try demo here.

  • Drag on canvas to translate all items.
  • Click on item to select it.
  • Click while pressing SHIFT to enable multi selection.
  • Drag selected items to translate them.
  • Drag from a node output to a node input to create an edge.
  • Press BACKSPACE to delete selected items.
  • Double click on canvas to open the selector.
  • Type into the selector then press ENTER to create a new node.

Constructor

Create a FlowView instance and pass it a container argument. It will create a flow-view custom element and attach it to the container. If no argument is provided, default container will be document.body. Be aware that the flow-view custom element will fit the whole height of its container, so make sure to style properly to avoid a zero height container.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <body>
    <script type="module">
      import { FlowView } from 'https://unpkg.com/flow-view';

      const flowView = new FlowView({ container: document.body });
    </script>
  </body>
</html>

If some flow-view custom element is already in the page, it can be passed to a FlowView instance via the element argument.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <body>
    <flow-view id="my-view"></flow-view>

    <script type="module">
      import { FlowView } from 'https://unpkg.com/flow-view';

      const flowView = new FlowView({ element: document.getElementById('my-view') });
    </script>
  </body>
</html>

Add a list to define which nodes are available. It makes sense to be provided in the majority of use cases.

flowView.addNodeLabels([
	"Marge",
	"Homer",
	"Bart",
	"Lisa",
]);

node(id)

Get flow-view node by id.

const node = flowView.node("abc");

edge(id)

Get flow-view edge by id.

const edge = flowView.edge("abc");

graph

Access current flow-view graph.

console.log(flowView.graph);

loadGraph({ nodes = [], edges = [] })

Load a flow-view graph.

flowView.loadGraph({
	nodes: [
		{
			id: "dad",
			label: "Homer",
			x: 60,
			y: 70,
			outputs: [{ id: "children" }],
		},
		{
			id: "mom",
			label: "Marge",
			x: 160,
			y: 70,
			outputs: [{ id: "children" }],
		},
		{
			id: "son",
			label: "Bart",
			x: 60,
			y: 240,
			inputs: [{ id: "father" }, { id: "mother" }],
		},
		{
			id: "daughter",
			label: "Lisa",
			x: 220,
			y: 220,
			inputs: [{ id: "father" }, { id: "mother" }],
		},
	],
	edges: [
		{ from: ["dad", "children"], to: ["son", "father"] },
		{ from: ["dad", "children"], to: ["daughter", "father"] },
		{ from: ["mom", "children"], to: ["son", "mother"] },
		{ from: ["mom", "children"], to: ["daughter", "mother"] },
	],
});

clearGraph()

Empty current graph.

flowView.clearGraph();

destroy()

Delete flow-view custom element.

flowView.destroy();

An use case for destroy() is the following. Support you are using Next.js, you need to load flow-view with an async import into a useEffect which need to return a callback to be called when component is unmounted.

This is a sample code.

import type { FlowView } from "flow-view";
import { FC, useEffect, useRef } from "react";

const MyComponent: FC = () => {
	const flowViewContainerRef = useRef<HTMLDivElement | null>(null);
	const flowViewRef = useRef<FlowView | null>(null);

	useEffect(() => {
		let unmounted = false;

		const importFlowView = async () => {
			if (unmounted) return;
			if (flowViewContainerRef.current === null) return;
			if (flowViewRef.current !== null) return;

			const { FlowView } = await import("flow-view");

			const flowView = new FlowView({
				container: flowViewContainerRef.current,
			});
			flowViewRef.current = flowView;
		};

		importFlowView();

		return () => {
			unmounted = true;
			if (flowViewRef.current !== null) flowViewRef.current.destroy();
		};
	}, [flowViewRef, flowViewContainerRef]);

	return <div ref={flowViewContainerRef}></div>;
};

newNode() and newEdge()

Create nodes and edges programmatically. See programmatic example here.

// Create two nodes.

const node1 = flowView.newNode({
	label: "Hello",
	inputs: [{}, {}],
	outputs: [{ id: "output1" }],
	x: 100,
	y: 100,
	width: 80,
});
const node2 = flowView.newNode({
	label: "World",
	inputs: [{ id: "input1" }],
	width: 100,
	x: 250,
	y: 400,
});

// Connect nodes with an edge.
flowView.newEdge({
	from: [node1.id, "output1"],
	to: [node2.id, "input1"],
});

deleteNode() and deleteEdge()

Delete nodes and edges programmatically. Notice that when a node is deleted, all its connected edges are deleted too.

const nodeId = "abc";
const edgeId = "123";

flowView.deleteNode(nodeId);
flowView.deleteEdge(edgeId);

addNodeClass(nodeType, NodeClass)

Can add custom node class. See custom node example here.

onChange(callback)

React to flow-view changes. See demo code here.

Callback signature is ({ action, data }, info) => void, where

  • action can be CREATE_NODE, DELETE_NODE, ecc
  • data change based on action
  • info can contain { isLoadGraph: true } or other optional information.

Just take advantage of autocompletion and suggestion provided by typings definitions.

License

MIT