About yFiles FLEX

yFiles FLEX provides essential building blocks for web-based applications that need to visualize, animate, and edit graphs, diagrams, or networks.

Web applications using yFiles FLEX offer a user experience that was known previously only from desktop applications. And all that in your web browser.

• No browser compatibility issues! Your yFiles FLEX application will look the same no matter which browser and operating system it runs in. The only requirement to run a Flex 2 application is an installed Flash Player version 9. The Adobe Flash Player is installed on most internet-enabled PCs today.
• Full-featured web-based graph viewing, editing and animation. The yFiles FLEX framework allows you to easily create rich internet applications (RIAs) providing the same user experience as regular desktop applications. You will benefit from the usual advantages of RIAs over thin client approaches: richer user interfaces, higher responsiveness, better client/server work balance, asynchronous communication, and higher network efficiency.
• Benefit from our graph drawing software experience. All our expertise from the development of our other successful graph drawing products (yFiles for Java, yFiles.NET and yEd) was leveraged for the development of the yFiles FLEX API.

Outstanding Features

• Highly customizable node and edge styles: The style API of yFiles FLEX offers easy to use default style classes as well as a convenient framework to create your own node and edge styles. Nodes may also be represented by image files (both bitmap based and scalable formats are supported) or SWF movies.
• GraphML: Using the yFiles FLEX API, your web client application can parse graph structure and style information given in the human readable GraphML format. The format can be used to communicate with any server software component that can export graphs in GraphML format, like e.g., yFiles for Java and yFiles.NET or to load local GraphML files into a standalone yFiles FLEX application.
• Interaction: The client API provides default implementations of various interaction modes that could be needed in diagramming applications and elaborate support for concurrently enabled interaction modes. The yFiles FLEX framework already includes customizable implementations for creating, moving, and resizing graph items and for providing tooltips and context menus for any objects shown in the view component.
• Animation: yFiles FLEX can create easily customizable morphing animations between different graph layouts. In addition, the framework allows you to effortlessly create hover effects for nodes shown in the view.
• Remote API: The framework provides convenience classes to facilitate the communication with a yFiles server component.

Using yFiles FLEX

Although it is possible to use yFiles FLEX as a standalone diagramming application that runs in a web browser or in the standalone Flash Player, most use cases will require an additional server component that is responsible at least for graph layout calculation and centralized data storage.

The perfect complement for yFiles FLEX are the yFiles for Java and yFiles.NET libraries which provide state-of-the-art graph analysis and layout algorithms. yFiles FLEX already contains convenience classes for communicating with a yFiles Java or yFiles.NET server.

Usually, yFiles FLEX will only have to communicate with the server component when a new graph layout is to be calculated or when changes have to be loaded from or submitted to the data storage. Since all other tasks that need to be performed in a diagramming application can be conducted on the client and since client and server communicate asynchronously, users will experience a web-based application that is almost as responsive as a normal desktop application.

The server component of the Adobe Flex Framework (Flex™ Data Services) is not needed to create a Flex application with yFiles FLEX.

Demo Applications

DOM Tree

The DOM tree demo application demonstrates the powerful combination of a yFiles server, yFiles FLEX API and standard Flash animation and effect capabilities.
The demo provides a text input field for entering URLs. The HTML page that is found at the given location is parsed into a tree structure on the server. In addition, the server calculates a layout for the resulting tree structure and annotates the nodes with their HTML tag type.
The client then displays the generated tree. When the user hovers over a node, a flash effect is triggered which enlarges the node and displays the corresponding HTML tag type as a label.

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Graph Canvas

The graph canvas demo application demonstrates graph parsing, layout and navigation with yFiles FLEX.
Various GraphML files that are present in a defined directory on the server can be loaded into the view using the provided combobox. At first, the graph will be loaded using the node coordinates specified in the GraphML file.
The graph layout can be changed using the Layout combobox. This will prompt the server to compute a new layout for the current graph.
The Help tab in the application documents the various possibilities of user interaction with the diagram shown in the view component.

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If the currently loaded graph provides description data for any nodes or edges, this data will be shown in tooltips that appear when hovering over the graph items. If the graph provides URLs, the context menu of the corresponding items will contain an entry that will load the URL in a new Browser window.

Drag and Drop

The Drag and Drop demo application demonstrates the interaction of the yFiles FLEX client library and the Flex Component and Drag and Drop framework. The demo features an accordion component containing three palettes each holding different kinds of node styles. The node styles can be selected as the default node style for node creation or nodes can be created by dragging a node style from the palette to the view. In addition, automatic layouts can be calculated for the manually created graph.

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Collapsible Tree

The collapsible tree demo application is an example yFiles FLEX application that provides some functionality beyond simple view navigation. Each node of a tree shown in the canvas may either be collapsed or expanded. The children of collapsed nodes are not visible on the canvas. Whether or not the tree nodes are expanded is indicated by a custom node style.
The application demonstrates custom behavior of both the view shown in the client and the servlets the client communicates with.

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GraphWiki

The GraphWiki demo is a simple demo that implements a Wiki-like graph repository. Users may load, edit, and save graph instances, add descriptions and URLs to the nodes in the graphs and share them with other users simply by telling them the name of the graph. Create nodes and edges using the common graph editing gestures of all demos and attach a description or an URL to the nodes by right-clicking on them and using the action in the provided popup menu. The graphs are stored on the server under the name that can be entered at the top of the form.

Launch Demo  

Documentation

• yFiles FLEX Developer's Guide (online)
• API documentation (online) of the yFiles FLEX client library

Commercial Information

Learn more about the terms for the commercial or academic use of yFiles FLEX:

• license types

For ordering information and prices, please contact: sales@yWorks.com.

Evaluate yFiles FLEX

You can test and experience the yFiles FLEX with a 30-day, fully functional evaluation version.