Interactions

uDraw(Graph) has some very useful interactive operations to work with a graph visualization. Some of them, namely selection and fine-tuning, have already been discussed in the previous sections.

Scaling (menu View/Scale...) can be used to get an overview of a graph that does not fit in a window. The scale of a window can be set to any rate between 1% and 100%. In reduced scales smaller than 100%, some details are not shown (e.g. the text of nodes), but all operations are still available.

Abstraction operations (menu Abstraction) are available to temporarily hide uninteresting or confusing details of a graph. Two abstractions are available: hiding subgraphs and edge. By hiding a subgraph, all child nodes are removed from the visualization that can only be reached (via edges) from the currently selected node. The other abstraction, edge hiding, removes all incoming and outgoing edges of a node from the visualization. Both abstractions can be undone with appropriated menu functions.

Some useful navigation and search features are available in menu Navigation. With the navigator, a user can browse in a graph by moving to the nearest neighbour or relative node of a currently selected node. Selection functions show the parents, siblings or children of a selected node. Finally, a find function can be used to search in a graph for nodes with a particular text.

Next: Multi-Graph and Multi-View.