07 Create Labels Sources - Tutorial: Graph Builder [yFiles for HTML]

Adding labels

In this tutorial step, you will learn how to configure GraphBuilder in order to add labels to the visualization.

Note	This step is optional when building a graph with GraphBuilder. If you do not want to add labels to your graph, you can proceed with the next step.

Loading node label information

There are three ways to add labels to the visualization using GraphBuilder. You can use bindings or load the labels from their own sources on the NodeCreator.

For this step, we will use a simple company ownership diagram.

Creating labels using bindings

If you want to create the label text based on the properties of the business data, you can bind the text to a property in the node’s data. For example, in the dataset below, we bind the label text to the name of the associated node.

const nodeData = [
  { id: '0', name: 'Investment Capital' },
  { id: '1', name: 'Melissa Barner' }
]
const nodesSource = graphBuilder.createNodesSource(nodeData, 'id')

// create the label binding to the name property
nodesSource.nodeCreator.createLabelBinding((data) => data.name)

The label binding can also be set explicitly using the text provider property. In this example, the label text is converted to upper-case to show that text can be augmented.

const nodeData = [{ id: '2', name: 'Monster Inc' }]
const nodesSource = graphBuilder.createNodesSource(nodeData, 'id')

// create the text provider that will return the name of each node
const labelCreator = nodesSource.nodeCreator.createLabelBinding()
labelCreator.textProvider = (data): string => data.name.toUpperCase()

Creating labels from their own sources

If the node data contains a varying number of label data, you can use a LabelsSource to create the labels. For instance, take a look at the dataset below where the label information is stored in the owners property.

const nodeData = [
  { id: '3', owners: ['Local Group', 'Germany'] },
  { id: '4', owners: ['International Group'] }
]

In this case, the provider which is given as parameter is expected to return an enumerable of data items where each item represents one label.

// create the label sources based on the `owners` property
const labelsSource = nodesSource.nodeCreator.createLabelsSource(
  (data) => data.owners
)

Loading edge label information

Following a similar approach, we can also create labels for the edges. In this example, we bind the edge label text to the ownership property of the dataset and we add some more text information.

const edgeData = [
  { id: '0', sourceId: '1', targetId: '0', ownership: 30 },
  { id: '1', sourceId: '0', targetId: '2', ownership: 60 },
  { id: '2', sourceId: '4', targetId: '0', ownership: 5 },
  { id: '3', sourceId: '3', targetId: '0', ownership: 5 }
]
const edgesSource = graphBuilder.createEdgesSource(
  edgeData,
  'sourceId',
  'targetId',
  'id'
)

// bind the label text data and add some more text information
edgesSource.edgeCreator.createLabelBinding(
  (data) => `Owns ${data.ownership}%`
)

Note	Please have a look in this tutorial step’s demo code in `create-labels-sources.ts` and play around with the different ways to add labels to the visualization.