Tutorial Exercise 3.3: Navigation Features to browse in a Graph

For the last exercise in this section, we will come to the operations of the Navigation menu. First, select an arbitrary node in the graph. To see the parents, siblings or children of the current selection (the siblings are the children of all parents of a particular node), choose one of the first three menu entries of the "Navigation" menu, e.g. Navigation/Select Children. This will clear the current selection and the corresponding set of parent, sibling or child nodes is selected, depending on the operation you choose. You can even select more than one node before using these operations to find all of their parents, siblings or children (please follow this link if you need more information about how to select more than one node at a time). When you have selected an edge, the menu entries for selecting parents and children are available to select these particular nodes of the edge.

A very useful feature is the navigator dialog which appears after using menu Navigation/Navigator.... Please select exactly one node in the graph and press one of the four arrow buttons in the navigator dialog to go to the next node in the corresponding direction. This way you can easily browse a graph by hopping from node to node. The speed of animation, used for scrolling to the new focus point, can be adjusted with menu Options/General Settings.... You can also use the cursor keys of the keyboard to trigger navigation, so usually you do not need the navigator dialog (by the way, you can scroll in a base window in vertical direction by using the PageUp and PageDown keys of the keyboard which are usually located above the cursor keys). The check button "Structural Navigation" is explained on the navigator dialog help page of the user interface documentation.

Finally we will search for nodes with a specified text with the find dialog. Select menu Navigation/Find... to get this window. Now enter the (sub-) string you are looking for in the find field. If you have loaded file "graph_example.udg", then for example type a 6 and press the find push button afterwards. This will search for a node with a text containing the 6. Press find again to go to the next match.

After playing a little bit with these features, close both the find and navigator dialogs by selecting the close button, if not already done.

End of Exercise 3.3. Go back to the Section 3 Overview.