Getting started

with yFiles for HTML

Work through the interactive beginners tutorials

If you prefer to learn by exploring and experimenting, check out the live tutorials included in this package.

There are several tutorials for the complete beginner:

As a prerequisite for this tutorial, you need to have opened the packages' project in an IDE (i.e. WebStorm or VSCode), as described in First-time setup. The first tutorial step can be found relative to the package root, at

demos-ts/01-tutorial-getting-started

demos-js/01-tutorial-getting-started

Read and work through the written tutorial

The written tutorial takes you through the basic concepts of working with yFiles in a step-by-step manner. Links to detailed documentation are provided throughout this tutorial.

As a prerequisite for this tutorial, you need to have opened the package's project in an IDE (i.e. WebStorm or VSCode), as described in First-time setup.

Watch introductory videos

The yWorks YouTube channel provides several helpful videos introducing the most important steps and concepts. Start your journey to becoming a proficient yFiles developer.

Experiment with demos

The yFiles package contains over 100 demos presenting the various features of the library and how to use them in your own code. We invite you to open the various demos in the IDE and experiment with them.

demos-ts

demos-js

Work through the interactive advanced tutorials

In addition to the tutorials for beginners, you'll find tutorials that deal with specific topics:

Further reading

The yFiles library includes comprehensive documentation about its concepts, features and API. Some entry points for beginners are:

Integrate yFiles into an existing project

yFiles is compatible with all modern web application frameworks, so it can be easily integrated into your existing application. After including the library, there are multiple demos show you how to add graphs to your application.

General integration

The easiest way to include the yFiles for HTML library into your project is to use it as a local npm module. Find lib-dev/es-modules/yfiles-25.0.4-dev.tgz in your yFiles package and add it as a dependency to your package.json.

>npm install --save <yFiles package path>/lib-dev/es-modules/yfiles-25.0.4-dev.tgz

The npm module comes with support of code completion for both JavaScript and TypeScript. If necessary, these typings can be generated and included in existing projects at any time.

For more information on how to set up this module, see the Working with the yFiles npm module chapter in the Developer's Guide.

Before you can start developing, register the yFiles for HTML license. Import License and set the value to the license's content.

Using yFiles in a framework-specific project

Each framework comes with special requirements. We provide specific advice for most common toolkits.

Several demos showcase yFiles integration with different frameworks:

Distributing your application

Before distributing your application, we highly recommend that you obfuscate and minify the resulting application. This reduces the download size of the library files for your end-users and protects your intellectual property by making the application source code harder to read.

The top-level deployment directory contains the yFiles deployment tool that provides name obfuscation and minification, especially for the yFiles for HTML library, amongst others. For more details, see the description in the deployment directory or the respective section in the Developer's Guide.