I need to draw a corporate structure tree (sort-of like a family tree) in C#. All the ancillary code is there. It is colored, interactive, and fancy. The only trouble is the algorithm that actually decides where to put each node is giving me a lot of grief.
For the moment, boxes are 100x50 in size, and I have a class called StaffNode which represents a staff member at a particular x,y co-ordinate.
The algorithm just needs to create a List<StaffNode> with the appropriate x's and y's.
This is incredibly tricky.
Basically the algorithm is recursive along the corporate structure, so left->right, then top->down along the tree. Obviously it is bad if two nodes are on top of one another.
I can think of a few algorithms that might produce something like this:
*
o O
o o o o o O
o O O O O O
O
Whereas something like this would be better, since the tree is very large and space is very limited:
*
o O
o o o o o O
o O O O O O
O
Have any of you had to draw a tree like this before? If you have I'm sure you've come across the many hurdles I've got. Any tips? So far I've spent an entire day on it.
There are many good algorithms for drawing trees, each of which shows off some different property of trees. If you want to show off a hierarchy, there is this code for WPF that draws hierarchies. For a more general discussion of how to draw graphs and trees, considering looking at these lecture slides on the Reingold-Tilden algorithm, which is relatively straightforward to implement and runs quickly in theory and practice. There's also these excellent slides covering similar material.
Hope this helps!