yFiles for HTML Demos Tutorial: Graph Builder 09 Configure Tags yFiles Demos

Customizing data stored in the graph

By default, GraphBuilder stores each business data item in the corresponding graph element’s tag.

In this tutorial step, you will learn how to use a tag provider to customize the data available on the tag. This can come in handy, when you want to augment your data with additional information or when you want to strip parts of the original business data, to lower the memory load of the built graph for instance.

Note	This step is optional when building a graph with GraphBuilder. If you do not want to augment the data in the node’s tag, you can proceed with the next step.

Original business data

The dataset for this tutorial step represents a company ownership diagram and can be found in ownership-data.json of this tutorial step’s demo code. This dataset contains items like this:

type EntityData = {
  id: string
  name: string
  type: 'Trust' | 'Corporation' | 'Branch' | 'PE_Risk'
  currency?: string
  jurisdiction?: string[]
}

Desired tag data

Assume now that for each node, we need to store only the information about the name and the type of each business entity and for each edge only the ownership.

The desired tag types should then look like this:

type OwnerData = {
  name: string
  type: string
}

Configuring the tag provider

For the custom tag creation, a tag provider is required that will return an object with the values of the name and type property of the nodes created by the specific NodesSource.

// configure the provider that returns an object with the name and the type property of the nodes
nodesSource.nodeCreator.tagProvider = (data): OwnerData => {
  return { name: data.name, type: data.type }
}

Custom creation of edge and label tags works the same way as for node tags. Simply define a tag provider on EdgeCreator or LabelCreator.

Note	Please have a look in this tutorial step’s demo code in `configure-tags.ts` and play around with the example data and different `tag` configurations.

10 Configure Layout