Build Your own Graph

A walk through our Graph Builder

Some times, none of the suggested Template meet our requirements, or we simply we want to build our own Graph structure.

The following guide will cover all the information needed to build, or edit a Graph structure.

In an empty Workspace, the Graph builder should start off like that:

The Graph builder is an interactive interface, that requires both mouse and keyboard interactions.

Below is a list of all available keyboard & mouse combinations:

Action	Combination
Create Vertex	Shift + Left Mouse click (somewhere)
Create Edge	Shift + Drag mouse between 2 Vertices
Delete Vertex	Select Vertex + Backspace
Delete Edge	Select Edge + Backspace
Copy/Paste Vertex	Select Vertex
Change Graph Layout Algorithm	Mouse Right Click (somewhere) + Change Layout

Create and edit Vertex

Creating vertex is possible by holding Shift and then Left Clicking somewhere in the Graph Builder area.

By doing so, a window will pop up:

This is the Vertex properties visual editor. In this form, you can assign initial properties to the new vertex.

Currently Gremlify Supports only "plain" properties. We plan to support more data types in the future.

Please note that the vertex label is a mandatory property, and is immutable. That means that once created, a vertex's label can not be changed.

Now let's take a look on the new born Vertex:

Let's take a look at the vertex toolbar:

This toolbar gives us glimpse over the vertex properties, and some basic operations.

1. Edit - edit any of the vertex properties, excluding label.

2. Delete - delete the vertex

3. Change Label Color - every label is represented by a different color (we do not enforce that). Changing the color from here will affect any vertex with the label "Person".

Create and edit Edge

Creating edges requires at least two vertices, obviously.

Let's create another Vertex and try to create our first edge by selecting one of the vertices, hold Shift and drag the mouse into the second vertex:

Creating a new Edge

Similarly to the Vertex creation flow, a popup window should now appear with the Edge properties editor.

The Graph is a directed multigraph. That means, that each Edge has a source and target nodes, and this obviously have some logical implications.

Delete Vertex/Edge

Deleting graph entities is simple and could by done by selecting a Vertex/Edge and pressing on Backspace (might be "delete" in some keyboards).

When deleting a Vertex, any of it's incoming and outgoing edges are also deleted

Change Graph Layout

As some of you might know, no Graph Layout Algorithm can fit any Graph.

Therefore, Gremlify suggests a few algorithms you can choose between, so one maybe one of them might do the work for you.

Simply right click somewhere in the Graph Builder area -> Change Layout:

Graph Layout menu

Currently we support two variations of a Force Directed Layout. We plan to add more algorithms in the future.

When saving a workspace, if non selected, Gremlify will set "Force Directed (Dagre)" as the layout algorithm. That implies that the loaded workspace will probably have a different layout than the hand crafted structure.